


A Little More Beast than Beauty

by SenkoWakimarin



Category: Cable and Deadpool
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood and Gore, Consentacles, Deepthroating, Grand Theft Auto as in They Steal a Car, Gun Violence, Human/Monster Romance, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Sounding, Tentacle Sex, Tentacles, domestic terrorism, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 23:42:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17734892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: This isn't really how mercenary work is supposed to go. Monster-hunting work either, from what Wade gathers.He'll make it work.





	1. A Beautiful Beginning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kokopellifacetattoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kokopellifacetattoo/gifts).



> Juice, this was your idea, and I'm hoping I'm not too far off the mark. Hope it's enjoyable.

As a mercenary, you really weren’t supposed to fuck your target. You _could_ , and some people’s whole gimmick revolved around that approach, but it was kind of a low move. And while Wade wasn’t above low moves, generally, it would take a lot more effort to seduce a target than it was worth when he could just shoot, stab, or introduce them to a fatal amount of gravity.

He liked pushing people out windows, so sue him. He was waiting for a magic physics defying dumpster to show up and save someone’s life.

Or maybe he just liked the rotten-fruit-meets-hammer sound they made when they hit the ground. Who could say?

Anyway, Wade knew well enough that when someone paid you to find and, if at all possible, kill what they called “that fucking horrorshow”, you weren’t supposed to fuck it. When “that fucking horrorshow” had somehow devastated an entire squad of highly trained monster hunters, you were really, really not supposed to fuck it. Like, it went without saying; it wasn’t even supposed to be on the table.

Wade really, _really_ wanted it to be on the table.

First of all, calling this guy a monster was _pushing it_ , in Wade’s humble opinion. Two legs, two arms, head on a torso, all in the regular configuration. Usual assortment of eyes, nose, ears, and mouth for a face. So he was kind of made of metal. So he had a bunch of metal tentacles that sometimes lost the shape they tried to hold together that made up his rather-average-from-a-distance body. There were weirder looking mutants, and way, way scarier, less fuckable monsters.

They called the thing ‘Cable’, and Wade supposed that was on account of the whole ‘being composed of metal tentacles (or cables if you were less into hentai)’ thing. Cable was _massive_ , for one thing. His main, walking around body was somewhere between six-and-a-half and seven feet tall, and he was _thick_. And there was _more_ to him than just the part that walked around; all the metal erupting and zipping through the ground was part of him. He could control all of it as easily as Wade could raise his hand, and it was _sexy_.

Admittedly, maybe, Wade’s tastes were a little avant garde. A little unusual. And he looked like something that crawled out of Evil Dead, so he had learned not to be picky, too.

He liked the metal. He liked the tentacles. He was pretty sure the thing was sapient because he was pretty sure he’d seen it talking to itself.

Himself. Looked like a dude, he was banking on it being a dude even though that big gloriously naked metal body was a little smooth where most folks kept their bits.

Yeah, the contract was for a very nice, cool million. An absurd amount to throw away on a chance to get his back blown out by H.R. Giger’s wet dream, but who could put a price on love?

“Not me, baby,” Wade murmured to himself, watching as Cable made his regular patrol through the area he’d… what, claimed? Infected? Neither word quite worked, but they were equally effective.

According to Google this charmingly scifi/horror little island had once been _Monhegan_ Island, a cute little spot off the coast of Maine. People used to come here to watch birds or something. Google search pulled up all kinds of photos of pretty little overlooks and old mill buildings and that kind of picturesque shit.

Now that was all gone. The buildings where the town proper had been were overgrown with metal growths that looked a lot like vines. Metal erupted abruptly from the ground, chasing organic lines like tree roots. Everything that had once been alive was overcome with gleaming, brilliant metal. All sixty-eight residents of the island were missing, presumed dead.

There were no signs of any remaining organic life. Even the grass was yellow, brown, lifeless. The trees were being choked by metal and didn’t look too hot either.

Cable patrolled the town part of the island, but from what Wade had been able to see, the rest of the four or so square miles of the island barely interested him. It was definitely all… overcome with that metal stuff, all cords and huge, jutting vines of silvery growth, but as long as Wade had watched, and he’d been watching for _days_ , trying to plan, the guy hadn’t left the area with the buildings.

Wade had seen a few birds land on the far side of the island while he’d been looking for a place to try sneaking in without Cable noticing, and though the humanoid never appeared, the metal had snagged a number of the birds and consumed them. Just swallowed them up in more metal until there was nothing left to see but a few irregular lumps in the spread of metal covering the ground.

So sneaking onto the island was a challenge already. Wade was pretty sure this wasn’t going to be the thing that killed him, but he’d really prefer not to risk it. At least not until he figured out if the guy could fuck because, _damn_.

Laid up on his little speed boat, Wade watches Cable through binoculars and rolls a few ideas around in his head. Obviously he could talk -- Wade couldn’t get a _super_ crisp look at him, but he could see well enough to know he was often talking to himself as he moved. Sometimes he floated, sometimes he actually used his legs, but he never, as far as Wade had seen, moved faster than an average walking pace.

He seemed to be looking for something, but whatever it was, he couldn’t find it. Maybe that was a good way to get his attention, to ingratiate himself with the guy. Whatever he wanted, maybe Wade could help him get it.

Yeah, he already had his very own island in the north Atlantic, but hell, everybody always wanted more. It was human nature. The guy looked human, so that probably followed for him, too, whatever he actually was. Everybody wanted something they didn’t have, and Wade was willing to help this particular guy if it meant he got a shot at some teratophilia.

What he was most worried about was trying to dock his stupid borrowed boat properly. The dock was crawling with slender, slowly creeping metal tendrils. It seemed to be consuming everything, eating up the ground and the buildings and burying anything it touched in more metal. Probably not something that should turn him on, but boy, it was kind of doing the trick.

It was less that Wade was worried about the metal eating him up the way it had the birds -- and, ostensibly, the grass, trees, and every other bit of organic matter available -- but more that all the other boats that had been moored at the dock were missing or, according to the guy who’d contracted him, had been scuttled to quarantine the island.

Which, now that Wade thought about it, might explain what Cable was looking for. A way off the island, which maybe was a bad thing to provide, given that he seemed to be infecting everything around him with that metal crap. And almost seventy people had disappeared.

Yeah, probably better not to give him an easy way to the mainland. The mainland had all the things Wade loved, and pretty much none of it would survive the freaky metal apocalypse. Like sure, losing Maine wasn’t much of a loss, but Maine was connected directly to _Canada_ , and yeah, it would have to go through _Quebec_ before it reached anything good, but then it’d get _Ontario_. He _liked_ Ontario.

Or at least Ottawa. Suck it Toronto.

So. In the interest of not losing Canada (and, he supposes, the rest of the the western hemisphere) to advanced metal growth, Wade needed to figure out how to get from here (a boat in the middle of the water) to there (an island that was rapidly losing ground to said metal growth) without putting his escape vehicle at risk.

He supposed he could swim. Sure, the north Atlantic was cold at the best of times, and sure, it’s February, and sure, his guns weren’t going to like going for a dip, but again: who could put a price on love?

Anyway, what was the worst that could happen? A little drowning? Some hypothermia?

“Maybe leave the heavier part of the arsenal on the boat,” he mumbles, hands already unclipping various straps and buckles from his personas he keeps his eyes on Cable. Cable, who is standing -- yeah, feet on the ground again, so standing -- right in the open, not lurking back by the overgrown buildings like usual. Wade gets the distinct feeling that he’s been spotted, given that the guy is just… frozen there, staring out over the water.

Which made leaving his weapons behind seem like a very bad idea, but, well, what was a boy to do when he had a cryptid to woo?

The water is, predictably, _extremely_ cold. Cold enough that Wade almost regrets jumping into it. It steals his breath for a moment, and he can’t bring himself to move for a bit, focusing on forcing himself to relax. He’s fallen into enough iced-over bodies of a water to know the drill, and the second he can, he starts a steady crawl toward the island.

When he looks for Cable, expecting him to still be lurking, watching, he sees no trace of him.

Only a little spooky.

In his favor, the ocean at least doesn’t try to smash him into the island. That would probably go very poorly, getting himself a nice collection of broken bones while he’s stuck on an island that evidently eats organic matter.

No, there’s actually a pretty nice beach up away from the wharf where ferries used to dock to drop tourists off. He pulls himself out of the water and lays there for a while, watching his breath steam the air and shivering, feeling his body go into an unpleasant overdrive to combat the various stresses he was putting it though.

“Shoulda packed some sandwiches,” he grumbles, pushing himself to his feet and dragging himself away from the water. It’s a balmy thirty-six degrees Farenheit, dry and sunny. If he hadn’t just been in it, the ocean would look inviting, the beach giving little sign of the weird metal infection. In fact, Wade makes it pretty far away from the spot he’d collapsed initially before he sees a neat vein of silver curling out of the ground.

He’s hungry and cold and wet, and it really isn’t the _best_ look for him, which probably says a lot, given his whole ‘lychee fruit meets shar pei dog’ thing, but he’s got a feeling it’s all going to be worth it. He’s on a mission of romance, and those always go well.

“Organic.”

Turning toward the voice, Wade feels his knees go a little weak.

Up close -- well, up _closer_ ; Cable maintains a distance of a few dozen feet -- Cable is even more interesting to look at than Wade had gathered from what he’d seen through binoculars.

Tall and broad, most of his body was given over to metal, his frame strapped with cords that seemed to mimic the arrangement of muscle groups. He looks like he should be _noisy_ , all those moving metal parts, but he’s silent. However, and this was _interesting_ , there were odd patches here and here that were a dull, unhealthily pale shade of human flesh. The fingers and a good swath of the back of his right hand were flesh; flesh crawled and danced over the right side of his neck, patches on his face shining through. They look oddly bloodless, that sallow, corpse-pale dullness endemic to dead bodies everywhere.

His right eye, though, is bright blue, human, alive. There’s a bright spot of blood in the sclera, highlighting the vibrance of the iris.

Wade got the sudden, distinct impression that the metal was _eating_ the flesh. As he watched, the thick coils of metal that made up Cable’s left arm loosened, the limb going oddly slack as it lengthened, reaching toward Wade. By the time one of the tentacles was close enough for Wade to smack it away, the arm had no cohesive shape, recognizable as an ‘arm’ insofar only as the whole mess was still firmly anchored to Cable’s shoulder.

“You are incomplete.”

“That’s kind of a rude thing to say to someone you just met,” Wade said, stepping out of reach of the tentacle mess trying to snag hold of him. “At least buy me dinner before you start in on how you can complete me.”

He’s in the process of questioning his life choices -- there’s something about the pained humanity in Cable’s right eye that makes Wade’s skin crawl -- and trying to back up as he’s advanced on when he trips over more metal. A thick cord of it, rising out of the ground, which promptly wraps around his thigh, squeezing as more tentacles approach, Cable pacing steadily closer.

“Do not struggle.”

“Yeah, easy for you to say!” Wade snarls, seriously regretting leaving the katanas on the boat. He manages to get hold of the heavy combat knife strapped to his free leg and finds that the tentacles, while predictably harder to slice through than flesh, can be cut away. He’s got his left arm free and is work on his leg when when cords wrap around the hand holding the knife and squeeze, hard and painful, metacarpals snapping, until he releases the blade with a yelp. “Bad touch! No means no!”

“You will be unified.”

Weirdly, the big guy sounds kind of sad about that, which would be a lot more worth paying attention to, in Wade’s opinion, if he weren’t also still aiming his freaky arm-tentacles for Wade’s face.

He has exactly enough time to register that the coils of metal sliding around him are _warm_ , would be kind of nice given how cold and wet he presently is, before the first tentacle shoves its way into his skull. It goes in almost dead center through his forehead, breaking through one of the thickest parts of the skull, which sounds altogether way more like a corpse hitting the pavement than Wade thinks is strictly healthy.

“S’not… how I ‘magined our firs’ penetrative sesh w’d go…” He muddles out, voice slurring and thick, because evidently even getting his grey-matter fucked open by a metal tentacle isn’t enough to shut him up.

It seems weird that this doesn’t hurt more. The way his body doesn’t want to respond to his desire to struggle is less weird; it’s not Wade’s first time with a brain penetrating injury. He can’t feel what’s going on inside his head anymore, and his vision is doing some fun things. He smells caramelizing onions and for some reason he tastes lemon, a combination that turns his stomach.

All in all, not great. Cable makes it worse by talking.

“Your mind is strange,” he says, and Wade feels so weird, like he can see himself from Nate’s eye, like he can feel the inside of his own brain from the surface of the tentacle. There’s a disgusting sound and his body spasms weakly as the tentacle in question probes around. “Wade. Chimichanga. Yellow white yellow yellow.”

“Sh’up,” Wade manages weakly. It’s the best he can do, and given his present predicament, it’s not bad. That sensation of being both in and out of his body, both himself and also part of everything around him, is getting worse. Usually when something pokes his brain and stirs around like this, he dies a lot faster. He’s not sure how he feels about how long it’s taking this time.

Less than great. Cable’s weirdly flat voice is carrying on, a stream of words that Wade can’t get himself to focus on well enough to translate into anything meaningful. He gives up on that. Gives up on trying to get his body to actually struggle. Stops thinking about escaping this. A little death might do him good, who knows.

There’s a weird sense, when his eyes stop working, of being… _other_. Completely outside himself. Everything is dark and huge and expanding, worming through the earth, seeking hidden organic matter below, dipping into the salt of the ocean and stretching toward the hollowness of the sky. He feels something he supposes could be considered contentment, a sense of belonging, and floats in that for a minute, before realizing that contentment is really fucking boring. And since when does _Wade Wilson_ belong anywhere?

He’s a nuisance. If there was a real paradise where everyone got along and held hands and loved everyone else, he’d probably get kicked out anyway.

Coming back to awareness of his own body is accompanied by several sensory notes.

One: his head is _killing_ him. If he didn’t just die then he really hoped he would soon because _wow_. Pain.

Two: there are weird metal growths blooming all over his skin. His suit is in tatters and the waxy, tumor-riddled flesh is alive with patches of silver. Even as he looks himself over, these metal patches and tendrils are shrinking and vanishing. It’s like some kind of infection, and the healing factor is dealing with it, making him feel hot and exhausted.

Three: Cable is holding his hand to his head, doubled over, mouth open in a soundless scream. His weird tentacles were snapping at the air and going wild, the ones that had previously been employed restraining him now flailing around on the ground, occasionally whipping Wade sharply across the ankle.

“Uh,” he tries, and then shuts up when Cable’s head snaps up, human eye wide with agony. There’s something about the set of Cable’s jaw and the deadly stillness of him that feels accusatory. But there’s a certain something in the gleam of the eye Wade can read that is almost grateful, too, and Wade is kind of freaking out. There’s blood still rolling down his face, the hole in his head almost entirely closed -- his skull always seems to grow back fast when foreign objects punch holes in it.

They stare at each other for a long moment, Wade’s body shedding metal and Cable’s twitching and spasming, barely holding form. The human-looking bits seem livid, even. Wade wonders if this is the part where he’s supposed to run.

“Run, you stupid fuck,” Cable says, voice a vicious snarl, utterly different from the flat, barely interested tone he’d been using before. His voice is still weirdly modulated, like it’s going through a computer filter, but there’s way more emotion there than he’d offered previously. Wade stares, still not moving.

Cable swipes at him with the writhing remains of his left arm, bloody brain matter still coating the end of the longest tentacle. Wade decides running is the right idea.

Even his dick isn’t twisted enough to want a repeat of that particular mind fuck.

The ocean is as cold as he remembered, worse for his suit being full of holes. By the time he’s back on his stupid little boat, coughing his lungs out after swallowing a few mouthfuls of ocean trying to get back onto the damn thing, he’s ready to admit that monsterfucking is a lot more complicated than he’d first though.

And expensive.

“Cost me a million dollars to get my brain fondled. I could buy a thousand metal dildos for that kinda green. Absolute bullshit. I’m gonna come back and blow his sexy metal ass to hell. Bastard.”

He looks back at the island just once as he’s turning back for the mainland. Cable is nowhere to be seen.


	2. Hello Again (Damn You)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wade doesn't really want to go back to Cable's little island paradise, but how can he resist a guy who attempts cold blooded murder on the first date?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter goes out to [inbox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inbox), who doesn't go here, but cares enough about this beast to see it proceed. Truly the real MVP.

It’s the end of March before Wade manages to get back to what used to be Monhegan Island. Between inclement weather and having to deal with a minor financial kerfuffle -- he had a tendency to go broke when he traveled, but god bless mankind; no matter where you went in this wide world, there was always someone willing to pay for someone else to die -- it was easy to write his avoidance of the place off as necessary. Playing it smart; there was no point in going back if he didn’t have a plan of attack.

If he was honest with himself (admittedly, a rare circumstance) he really _wasn’t_ scared of Cable, or of a repeat of that spectacularly fucked up first encounter. He’d already proven that Cable’s typical mode of attack didn’t work long term on him.

Still, sometimes, mostly in the dead of night when the TV stops being interesting and half the motel channels are gone over to infomercials, Wade finds himself thinking, remembering a sense of peace so deep that he wasn’t sure there was room in it for himself, or that he wanted there to be. A place where everything was so calm there could be no sense of self as he understood it.

 _That,_ ladies and gentlemen, _that_ freaked him out. And the fitful, uncertain desire to return to that place, that freaked him out more.

After the first week, when the money dried up suddenly and he started checking his favourite job sites for a little paying work, he thought maybe it was something he should just put out of his head. Yeah, he had a contract, but it wasn’t like they could sue him for breaking it. Wasn’t like they could even threaten to put him in a wheelchair or any of the usual grim dark promises made; all they could do was not pay him the rest of the million, and he’d already made peace with not getting it.

Maybe it was better to forget about the whole thing as a bad job, because he’d gotten away once and the idea of getting his brain scrambled a second time didn’t exactly appeal to him.

Except, unlike most things he decides to give up on, it doesn’t just rapidly fade from his thoughts. He thinks about it all the time; the way Cable looked at him, one eye cold and detached and the other so painfully tired and human. The difference in his voice between the flat, disinterested delivery when he’d first approached to the digitized growl when he told Wade to run.

He thinks about it all the time. Sitting on the couch eating a bowl of cereal; wondering if Cable needed to eat regular food, or if he ate weird organic robot food like the Transformers with Energon. Watching a mark arranging a deal in a Boston back alley, wondering if those eyes were always mismatched or if he’d once looked like a flesh and bone regular dude.

Laying on a noisy motel bed, wondering at how shitty his luck was that he’d already gotten fucked by those tentacles, except it was his brain getting rearranged instead of his guts.

It won’t leave him alone. It’s honestly kind of annoying -- he has absolutely nothing to gain going back there at this point, but it’s like some kind of fucked up siren call. Usually his natural inclination toward sloth would save him, but the more he slows down, the more he thinks about that fucking island and the fucked up metal guy trapped there.

And so, finally, like he has any damn choice in these damn narratives, he finds himself liberating another little boat and setting sail for the island.

This time, he leaves the boat in the channel between the main island and the smaller island on the western side. The water here is shallower and calmer which will make the trip to and from the boat more pleasant, and hopefully a little quicker. Given that Wade hasn’t seen hide nor hair of Cable during his painfully boring day long surveillance of the island, he’s not sure if he’s being smart, not just pulling up to the docks.

While he’d been casing boats to borrow, he’d heard more local muttering about Monhegan. Another group of monster hunters had stocked up earlier in the month, but they hadn’t touched base since. The ferry, of course, had long since stopped going out, and it was always possible that the men who’d left had just returned to mainland somewhere further up or down the coast.

Wade had his doubts about that.

Still, he can’t help wondering, teeth clenched and balls shrinking up from the cold as he swims, how many groups of missing monster hunters before the military got involved. Or the X-Men. This being Maine and not yet a global catastrophe, he doubted the Avengers would stick their noses in, but all those hero-types loved jumping into other people’s problems.

Also, this not occurring to him until he’s flopping on the hard-packed wet sand just out of reach of the waves, he still doesn’t really have a plan. He’s pretty sure Cable has to still be on the island, but if he is, why hasn’t Wade seen him? He had such a regular, almost scheduled pattern of behaviour before, like, Wade could have set a clock by his patterns, if he was the kind to use clocks that needed manual setting.

Instinct says Cable would probably be hiding in the town, where there’s plenty of cover and most of the weird metal tentacle growth was centered. Wade spends hours walking carefully around the abandoned farmland instead. His first steps on the grass -- which, when he plucks a blade and studies it up close, is covered in thin, overlapping tendrils of metal no thicker than hairs -- had been tentative, his mind playing back the image of a flock of birds screaming shrill, birdy cries as they tried to fly away and couldn’t, trapped by the metal that quickly covered and consumed them.

The grass does not try to eat him. In fact, none of the bigger tentacles that occasionally sprout from the ground in the fields react to him at all. Before, there had been a sense of walking into a very large creature’s mouth; the tentacles that had grabbed him had been warm and flexible. These, when he impulsively slapped his palm against one just to see what would happen, were cold and rigid.

It's like walking through a place so long abandoned that the citizens have been worn down to bone, soon to be dust. It’s spooky, and Wade finds his hand lingering near the gun belted to his hip. He pushes his way into a barn that was half consumed by the creeping metal, not sure exactly what he’s doing anymore other than nosing around, and finds the stalls full of twisted, disconcerting metal shapes. One of them has a hoof sticking out of it; the second his eyes find that, he can suddenly see the shape of what had once been a horse, laying on its side, created from tangles of metal tendrils.

“Gross,” he says to himself, and takes the time to try and discern the inhabitants of the other stalls as well. There’s a lump in the middle one of the walkways he first thinks was probably a dog, which suddenly resolves itself into the vague shape of a collapsed child. It makes his skin feel like it’s going to crawl off, and he leaves the barn at a brisk pace, not quite letting himself run.

Monhegan Island had a year-round population of sixty-odd people living here. Kids who took the ferry to go to school on the mainland. Adults who farmed and ran all the cute touristy attractions in town. They were all listed as “Missing Persons” except Wade’s pretty sure if he started poking around the various buildings, most of which are homes of some variety, he could find every single one.

Probably not identify them, but at least number them.

The town proper is worse than the farms. He kind of expects it to be, given the discovery in that barn, but it’s worse than his brain readily supplied. Bloodier. He supposes, walking up the main street and trying to force himself into a sense of nonchalance, that he should have expected _that_ too. Guys had come here at least twice with big guns looking to kill the metal monster that was supposed to be haunting the island. Of course there would be signs of that mess.

“Like Silent Hill crossed over with The Thing. The John Carpenter one, not that cinematic shit they took in 2011.”

Talking to himself helps. It does not distract him from the tattered tac vests and the twisted remains of perfectly good guns he periodically finds near suspiciously man-sized lumps of twisted metal that he refuses to closely examine in any way, but it _does_ help. He feels less like he’s stepped into Chrome Hell and more like he’s just on the set of a movie about it.

There’s blood on some of the metal, and an interesting sort of pattern to the metal growth itself, as if it’s spreading out from a specific source. The farther he follows the metal toward that source, the more blood he finds, which is fun.

He finds the first body not shrouded by metal sprawled across the sidewalk. Given the weather -- cold and wet -- the body hasn’t decomposed as much as it might have were it say, summertime, but it’s still swollen and marbled and just super not pretty. There’s a hole in the dude’s chest and evidence points to his having been thrown into the side of the building he now rests in front of.

However, the gun Wade finds a few feet away from the corpse is in good condition. A little wet from the damp sea air, but it seems like the last team must have made their move between storms. Nothing has washed away the smears of blood, after all, but at least the cold weather keeps the stink to a minimum.

Picking up the gun, he turns it over in his hand, making a face under his mask as he appraises his find. It’s not a bad piece, and can easily be cleaned up, so score one for Wade.

“Wade.”

The voice is soft, but there’s a sort of tinny, mechanical quality to the base that Wade will never be able to misplace. It’s a little like one of those distortions they use in cop shows to mask the voice of a witness who didn’t want to be identified; raspy and electronic but still capable of expressing some degree of emotion. When Wade turns toward the source, there’s nothing there to aim his new gun at, which is just as well because he’s pretty sure it won’t fire.

“I hoped you would come back.”

Yeah, Wade just bet he had. He frowns, pulling the gun from the holster on his hip and turning in a slow circle, trying to find where the metal bastard was hiding. He couldn’t help checking the ground periodically, expecting to see those tricky tentacles sneaking to grab him again.

Nothing moves. That’s a little weird; they hadn’t been shy last time.

“I didn’t expect you to, but I hoped.”

“You know, the horror movie creepy moving voice thing is like, _fun_ , but I’m really not in the mood for the Haunted Mansion on a Budget experience,” Wade snaps, both hands gripping a gun. “If you’re so happy to see me, why don’t you come on out? We can have a little chat.”

There comes a mechanical grinding sound, rhythmic and choppy. It takes Wade a second to realize it’s meant to be a chuckle. “I’m not interested in being shot.”

“I wasn’t interested in being skull fucked, either, but you know, we all make various sacrifices throughout our lives.”

Silence, for a moment. Then a sigh, the scrape of metal over metal. “I need your help.”

Now that is kind of interesting. Actually, now that Wade takes a second to think about it, all of this is kind of interesting -- Cable hadn’t exactly been interested in a spirited discussion last time around. He _definitely_ hadn’t been interested in help.

Slowly, with exaggerated finality, he reholsters the gun he knows works and lowers the free one he’d found. It’s impulsive, letting himself decide to trust a guy who’d already cracked his skull once, but he’s always been a sucker for a freak in need of a hand.

“Alright, big guy, let’s hear the elevator pitch. What do you need help with?”

Something moves behind him, and Wade turns sharply, hand hovering over his holstered gun. He doesn’t trust the one in his hand to actually fire, not after it’s been sitting on the ground in the elements this long, who knows how long since the last time it was cleaned and how much if any ammunition is left in the clip.

“Oh, man,” he whines, dropping his hand and sagging a little in disappointment. “Where did you even find clothes?”

Cable, walking toward him, is indeed fully dressed, which is honestly one of the biggest disappointments of the year so far. Top ten anime betrayals and most of them are getting between that sweet silver skin-metal and Wade’s eager eyes.

He gets another of those grinding metal chuckles and sighs, standing back back up straight to get an eyeful of what he _can_ see. After all, clothed or not, the guy is still a total MILF -- Monster he’d love to fuck.

And honestly, it’s not a bad look for him. Wade assumes somewhere on the island there’s some dead monster hunters missing their fatigue pants and fingerless gloves, but the black t-shirt stretched over that gleaming metal torso with the white silhouette of the island on it is straight out of the gift shop. For whatever reason, he’s still barefoot.

“What, couldn’t find any decent size twelves?”

Watching him emote is weird. He’s made of metal, shiny, high polished metal, and before, his expression hadn’t so much as flickered until after trying to tentacle-fuck Wade’s brain. Then his face had been a mask of pain, but it had just… _been_ that. Seeing him actually change expressions is uncanny -- metal shouldn’t do that. Shouldn’t move like flesh.

Raising his shoulders in a shrug, Cable leaves slightly more distance between them than is strictly casual. Wade imagines that’s mostly for his benefit, so, largely to be contrary but also to make a point that he’s not scared, he takes several steps closer.

Interestingly, Cable sort of flinches back, like he wants to regain the distance, but ultimately holds his ground.

“I don’t understand why you came back,” he says, and Wade knows he can’t explain it either, so doesn’t bother trying. After a beat of silence, Cable makes a face, and then takes a couple steps closer. These seem to be difficult steps for him, but he takes them, until they’re standing just out of arm’s reach of one another. “I need to get off this island. And I think… I’m nearly positive you’re the only person who can help me.”

His teeth, this close, look long and sharp. Fangs, really. Wade finds his eyes lingering there for a moment, and without his meaning to, imagines those teeth employed on him. Sinking into his flesh, maybe his shoulder but hopefully his throat. He feels his dick start getting invested in the idea and forces himself to think about taxes and Donald Trump’s sad little Cheeto dick, struggling to stay on topic.

Swallowing tightly, he makes a vague gesture with his newly rescued gun. “Several issues there, beginning with the fact that you somehow, uh, fucking ate an island with your metal grow-y tentacle powers and ending around the lack of trust from you _skull fucking me without permission_.”

A lot of things seem to flicker across Cable’s face at that; pain and regret and affronted guilt the easiest ones to discern.

“Wade, I deeply regret --”

“You know, I really don’t like you just knowing and using my name. I didn’t give it to you. You don’t know me.”

That gives Cable pause, something like shame crossing his expression, mostly in the lines on his forehead and a sort of wince in his eyebrows. It’s like he actually really feels bad, which is a wild concept to Wade. People didn’t generally feel bad about hurting him or inconveniencing him. In fact, a lot of people seemed to take a deep pleasure in it.

“I’m sorry.”

And he really sounds it, imagine that. Honestly, Wade’s not really used to people apologizing to him and showing any measure of sincerity about it.

“Please. I know it doesn’t… _fix_ anything, but I wasn’t in control, I couldn’t -- I didn’t _want_ to hurt you. It wasn’t…” Cable makes a frustrated noise, and Wade kind of gets it, in that bland kind of empathy one fuck up feels for another. There’s obviously more going on with his big metal monster friend than he initially thought. “None of this was meant to happen. And I need to leave before worse happens.”

Under the mask, Wade presses his lips together and narrows his eyes, trying to figure how stupid it is that his impulse is actually to trust this guy. Clearly he has not had the best go of it in the ‘not murdering everyone he meets’ vein, but then again, can Wade really claim much better? Sure, he’s never, to his knowledge, wiped out a whole island, but he’s killed more people than he can count. Everyone has off days.

He waves a hand like it’s not important. “Yeah, yeah, everyone’s sorry after. Let’s hear more about why I should help you.”

“I can’t pay you.”

“Weak start,” Wade says, giving a thumbs down. “Also I’m pretty sure I didn’t ask you to.”

Cable seems to consider him, eyes narrowing in obvious assessment. “I’m… I don’t know how to motivate you if I can’t reward you.”

Wade has to bite back a number of inappropriate responses to that, and makes a buzzer noise instead, doing the thumbs-down again. “We can figure out compensation later. Give me a reason to let there _be_ a later.”

“Because I will die here if you won’t take me with you, the sooner the better. I might kill a lot more people first, and cause god only knows how much more damage if the virus overpowers me again, but ultimately, I will die.”

 _The virus._ Christ, why was he _such_ a sucker for a sob story? He raises his hand and makes a circle in the air with it. “You were doing a real good job of taking care of yourself before. I seem to remember getting my ass pretty neatly handed to me.”

“Not by me. The virus… I used to be able to control it. I knew it was a death sentence, but I could keep it at bay.”

“So, what,” Wade makes another vague gesture, spreading both hands to either side. “You need me to get you to a doctor?”

“No.” For a guy supposedly desperate for help, Cable is awfully patient. “I hold the virus back telepathically. It’s… it’s a long story and I don’t know how much of it you’re prepared to believe.”

That earns a low snort from Wade. “You noticed the part where you punched a hole between my eyes, stirred my soup a bit, and I bounced back like nothing happened, right?”

Cable smiles thinly. “That’s why I know you can help me. I think you’re the only one who can. The virus is afraid of you.”

“Yeah, you’re gonna need to explain that way better, buddy.”

Evidently, Cable’s sighs sound a little like the fan in Wade’s laptop kicking on. “I travelled back in time from the future. The virus somehow latched on to the surge of power from the device I use to slide through time and overpowered my defenses. Worse, it used the extra power to expand far faster than it should have been able to. I was injured and it overwhelmed me, consumed most of body.”

Wade’s not sure if he’s disappointed to have it confirmed that the whole Full Metal look isn’t Cable’s factory setting. Certainly he feels something about it.

“When the infection reaches the brain, it’s supposed to kill you. By the time it hit  my brain, I was starting to be able to fight back. We reached… a sort of stalemate. It had already consumed most of the organic life it could readily access on this island. It can’t spread through salt water, could only hope to catch animals that came ashore or flew here, like the birds. Or it could keep part of me alive and use my mutant abilities to kill the humans I knew would eventually come, either to check in with the people who had been living here or specifically to destroy us.”

He really is a sucker for a sob story, proven by the gross sense of sympathy curling in his gut. It was one thing to be mad horny for the monster, it was quite another to want to give it a hug and tell it everything was going to be okay just because the guy sounded -- and looked, if the mistiness in that human eye was anything to go by, which Wade figured it was -- so broken up by what he’d done. Wade got it, kind of; a guy could make some horrible decisions when it came down to a live-or-die situation, providing he didn’t want to die.

“I was afraid of dying. And my death wouldn’t have stopped the TO, necessarily.” Wade assumed ‘the TO’ is the infection. Cable doesn’t clarify; he’s caught up in his own story now. “If it managed to infect another suitable host, one who didn’t die immediately -- what it was hoping you would be -- it could find a way off the island and begin infecting the masses without worry of running out of organic fuel. An epidemic this time period has no hope of containing.”

“And you want me to get you off the island when you’re carrying something that could, theoretically, end the world.”

“I have it contained.” He sounds a little offended to have to say it, and Wade finds _that_ part of this exposition session pretty hilarious. “Your government is planning on bombing the island, which won’t stop the TO right away, but might send shrapnel carrying the live virus onto organic life it can ride to the mainland anyway, without me fighting to control it. It’s clever, and it can control its consumption of a host well enough to ride something small long enough to get to something, someone, more suitable.”

“Just in the interest of full disclosure, what happens to you when the bomb drops?”

Cable gives Wade a flat look, which Wade supposes he deserves. He grins and holds his hands up and Cable shakes his head just slightly, frowning. “If you won’t help me, I will die, Wade. I’ve never encountered a mind like yours before, and neither has the TO. It’s never found an organic that could fight it off the way your healing factor did. It’s afraid of you.”

“Two more questions. One: why no shoes?”

A blink, confusion crossing Cable’s expression like the question is genuinely enough to throw him. “I didn’t need any,” is the answer he settles on, and Wade lofts his brows enough that it will translate through the mask, staring pointedly at his tourist-trap special of a t-shirt. “What’s the other question?”

“Does the metal crap feel stuff? Like touch stuff?”

“You know it does. You were in my head too,” Cable says, and Wade is surprised by how quickly Cable drops his heavy eye-contact after that. Admittedly, he _did_ know, though it’s only when Cable says it that he really understands what that alluring too-peaceful-for-sanity mental place had been, the place where he’d felt like he was in the earth and above it, like he was his broken skull and the metal pushing around into the softness of his brain.

Gives him the creepy crawlies.

“Alright. Oh! Okay, last one: can you swim?”

“I’m mostly metal, Wade. What do you think?”

“I think I should go get the boat by myself.”


	3. I Do the Dumbest Things for You

Cable is a heavy, quiet presence on the boat, something to the way he holds tight to the railing and stands so still he could be a really freaky art piece giving him the air of a skittish horse. Wade angles them to try and hit the beach away from any major populations. Cable seems keen to just stand where he’s standing, so Wade takes the time to study him in between fiddling with the controls of the boat and pretending he has more than the most rudimentary idea of how to really operate it.

It's like he's both fascinated by and terrified of the ocean around them. When he'd boarded the boat, he'd done so in a nervous sort of hurry, feet barely seeming to touch the ground. For all Wade knew, they hadn't -- he _had_ seen Cable float around before, when he'd been scoping the island out before their initial meeting.

Which was a very generous term for a situation that had involved exciting new holes being made in Wade's head.

As ill at ease as Cable still seems, he's obviously relaxed a little. The hand that's still got skin on it is wrapped loosely around the railing, no longer clutching in a white-knuckle panic every time they hit a choppy patch. His mouth is tucked in a little frown and his eyes are moving constantly, taking in the horizon, the pattern of salt-spray on his own shiny arm, watching Wade with some interest when Wade's pretending to be busy with something else. The most slender of his little metal tendrils all down his arms wave about, little snakes tasting the air.

His bare metal toes flex against the wet deck, his stolen tac pants soaked at the cuffs.

"I'm going to need your image inducer," He says suddenly, some minutes before Wade decides that, yes, the faint line he's seeing waaaay on the western horizon is, in fact, probably the shore of the mainland. Which means they're getting more and more likely to run into other people. Curious other boaters, Coast Guard, worse.

Still, Wade scowls, squinting at Cable. He's never been good at sharing his toys, and people _stare_ when he doesn't use the inducer.

"Don't you have your own tech, Future Boy?"

That human eye, all alone set in all that metal, still shows a lot of emotion. This time it's embarrassment and shame and something Wade recognizes way too easily, a certain breed of intense-but-deeply-smothered self loathing.

"The infection destroyed most of my tech when I lost control. Some of it I might be able to fix, given time and tools, but much of it I don't -- I won't -- much of it I don't think I can." Eyes focus again on Wade, keen and maybe a little desperate. "Please, Wade. At least until we get further inland. If I'm seen like this... It won't bring anything good. For either of us."

Wade grits his teeth and huffs and pulls the inducer off his wrist, holding it out to the big metal baby. Cable's human hand clenches hard on the railing and his waving little tendrils draw close to his body, his face pulling into a wince. He looks like he's steeling himself to move when Wade rolls his eyes and huffs again, storming over and grabbing the metal hand, yanking up and toward him, so he can fix the inducer around it like a watch.

He thinks it’s very polite of him not to point out how Cable flinches from his touch.

"You know how to use this?"

Cable has the good sense to look sheepish as several long, sharp looking silver tendrils push into the inducer and the whole device seems to sort of hardwire into Cable's arm. "I'll find a way to replace yours."

He says it like a suggestion, and Wade almost wants to laugh. "Damn right you will. Well? You gonna use it, or was that just a fun way of making sure we _both_ go to town looking like freaks?"

The air around the man barely flickers. If you didn't know what to look for -- and most folks don't -- you'd never know the silver-haired gentleman with the scared face and gentle, tired eyes wasn't the genuine article. Wade's amused to see that Cable has gone so far as to make the hologram give him shoes, tough-looking black boots.

Wade whistles. "There's a setting I didn't know it had. Silver fox in so many ways. You're gonna attract all kinds of looks anyway."

Big shoulders rise and fall in a shrug, Cable looking almost shy. "Next to you? I don't stand a chance."

Wow, rude. Low blow, even for a throw away joke.

"I'm gonna go change," Wade says briskly. "Deadpool showing up with a mysterious older gentleman in Bumfuck Beach, Maine might spread as news. No peeking, I'll be right back."

In the cabin, Wade shucks out of the Deadpool suit, wrinkling his nose at the way the wet fabric peels away from and drags at his skin. It always feels nastier, trying to pull the already clingy fabric away from his flesh when he gets soaked through, and there's no real avoiding that when you jump in the ocean several times.

The suit is shoved, still damp, in his duffel, along with his new gun (which still needs cleaning) and the other weapons he'd brought with him. He has a pair of board shorts and an absolutely horrific Hawaiian shirt. It's not exactly the right season for the fashion, but that always makes it more fun, and if people are going to be staring anyway...

On second thought, he kind of wishes he'd brought something a little blendier. They don't really need extra attention on them.

Well. If wishes were fishes, beggars would ride, or whatever. He pulls his normal-people clothes on, running a palm over his bald head as he looks around the room to make sure he hasn't missed anything, and then steps into his Crocs, grabs his bag, and heads back out to steer them back to what passes for civilization in coastal Maine.

It goes fairly well, bringing them to shore. He's tempted to tell Cable that they have to leave the boat in open water and swim the rest of the way, but the guy's walleyed and white knuckling the railing again. They get lucky, the rocky beach he cruises into is abandoned for the season, clearly attached to some kind of park. Empty, easy for them to slip out of, and easy for him to bring the boat to a rickety fishing pier for Cable to tentatively climb onto, feet never touching water at all.

Wade tosses his crap onto the pier, double checks that he's left the keys to the boat _on_ the boat, and joins his new cyborg pal.

"Okay, so where to now?"

The question seems to be a lot for the big guy. He looks, standing there facing the sea and looking out toward where they'd come from, a little lost. A little overwhelmed. Wade tries to put himself in the same mental place, alone, stranded, overcome by a lethal and murderous virus that's turned him into what most people are perfectly willing to call a monster.

His hand stings when he claps Cable on the shoulder, but it does the trick of shocking him back into himself, blinking down at Wade through the inducer's facade. Wade grins.

"Don't worry about it."

"I should have thrown myself in," Cable says softly, looking over Wade's head and back at the water. "The virus can't travel through salt water. I should have..."

Wade squeezes his shoulder, and strangely enough, it gives a little. The metal isn't quite as malleable as flesh, but it's not as hard as, say, steel. "And run the risk of it grabbing hold of some poor little fishes and the fishes getting caught by birds and the birds crapping the virus all over hell? Nah. This's better, don't you think? You, alive and in control?"

That gets a smile, tentative but honest. Wade wonders if this face is what Cable had looked like before being turned into the sickest Terminator cosplay ever. It suits him, rough but gentle on the edges, total action hero sort of look. Wade feels something funny happen in his chest and lower stomach, and gives Cable's shoulder another awkward pat before stopping to grab his bag and leading the way up the pier, away from the boat and the ocean and ever farther from the ruin of the island Cable had arrived on.

"I'm hungry. You hungry? D'you eat? Or is it like, nuts and bolts in bowls of oil kind of robot food for you?"

"I'm not a robot, Wade."

"Well, then d'you like diner food? Greasy breakfast cooked by dubiously washed hands and served on plates that were washed sometime around the day they were made..."

It's a long walk with only Wade's chatter for a sound track, but Cable seems content once the sound of the surf is behind them to just keep pace and listen. Not a big talker, Wade supposes.

They'd landed not too terribly far from the town of Beals, and by the time Wade was leading the trudge across the parking lot to an adorably homey looking diner, he was more than ready to eat something hot and greasy. Cable, who had been listening studiously to Wade's elucidation on the merits of ska music, had clammed up totally the first time they'd passed another human being, eyes zeroing in on a woman getting in her car, then on a kid walking his dog.

He seemed almost as unnerved by them as he had by the water, so Wade had done his best to set a beeline for the first place that advertised food. Everyone felt better after a meal, right?

They settle into a booth, Cable gripping the napkin-wrapped-silverware set in front of him, mouth a thin line as he watches Wade. His eyes show a little more white than Wade thinks is strictly necessary given that no-one is staring at _him_. All eyes are on Wade, sneaking glances and outright stares, the way they always are when Wade goes anywhere bare faced.

"I don't know if I can do this," Cable finally says in an undertone, clutching so tightly to the rolled silverware Wade's kind of afraid it'll come away crushed. "Wade, there's... so many..."

He sounds breathless and terrified, almost faint, but shuts up and smiles almost reflexively when the waitress shows up. It's pretty clear she was voluntold by the two other ladies hanging out by the register and trying not to be obvious about their staring. Wade grins like he's unbothered and asks for two coffees and a pair of menus. "New in town," he says, "Don't know what's good here yet."

When she leaves for the menus, he drops the smile, turning his look on Cable. "It's breakfast. Get your shit together, no one knows who you are and no one cares. Be cool, or at least for Christ's sake stop looking like you're about to piss yourself."

Wade elects to treat himself. He asks for two orders of pancakes, a meat lover's omelette, and biscuits. Cable, speaking in a careful voice that’s almost perfectly human, goes the more conservative route of requesting a glass of water and the breakfast special with rye toast, because Wade supposes when you've eaten a whole-ass island, you're less hungry later.

They're waiting for the food when a young guy pushes away from his table and saunters over, leaving two giggling girls and a scrawnier clone of himself behind.

Wade lets the kid open his mouth before he leans forward onto his elbows, lacing his fingers together and cutting him off. "Listen, kid, I'm gonna do you a favour. No, the circus ain't in town, the freaks didn't get loose, no one's filming a new Krueger movie, and we're really just passing through town. I _did_ hear Ringling is doing auditions, so why don't you and your buddies pack back into the clown car and take off before I decide to try some of Freddy's moves?"

The boy straightens, the cocky smug look on his face dropping into a sort of confused agitation before he seems to puzzle out the meaning of Wade's words and scowls. "I should kick your ass, fuckin' freak."

"Yeah? You wanna try it?"

"What's the point? You're hard enough to look at as it is."

Wade twitches a little, feeling Cable's hand on his forearm. When he glances at the bigger man, Cable looks tense and nervous, and shakes his head just once.

"My buddy doesn't like it when I beat up children, and I think I hear your mommy calling anyway, kid. Run along before I forget I already thought better of it."

The kid's smile is cocky and mean. Wade thinks he might be all of twenty, if that, full of all the self-assurance of youth and the meanness of a young guy stuck in small town with no way out. He's good looking enough to probably have been popular with girls in high school, but now that he's out he's just another face in the crowd and it makes him bitter. Wade remembers; there had been a lot of guys like him signing up for the armed forces.

"Yeah, I guess you wouldn't want to make your boyfriend mad, right? Probably looking for an excuse to leave your ugly ass."

There's a gun in Wade's hand, shoved in the kid's face before anyone can blink. Wade's on his feet, half out of the booth, Cable's hand still closed on his forearm.

Everyone is silent; even the sound of flatware on ceramic is gone. The smug, easy cruelty on the kid's face falls away to fear, eyes almost crossed to stare at the gun aimed between them. Wade smiles easily, the expression a tense mockery of the earlier friendly expression.

"Well, look at that. Guess I thought better anyway, huh?" He says, cocking his head to the side. "Now, my _boyfriend_ really doesn't like it when I make messes -- and believe me, they'll be scrubbing your brains outta the subway tile for _days_ \-- so I'm gonna make this a warning. Get the fuck outta here, kid."

The kid's eyes are saucer-wide, locked on the gun. Wade wants to take a step closer to him, push the muzzle against the kid's forehead, really scare him straight. The damage is already done, it's not like they're gonna actually get to eat here now anyway. Any minute someone's going to whip out a cell phone and call the cops, and they need to be gone before anything comes of that, but Wade's frustrated and hungry and angry pretty boy small town bullies always fill him with an almost nostalgic sense of simmering rage.

But Cable's hand is tight around Wade's other arm, and when he speaks his voice is tense. "Wade," is all he says, just his name, but it's beseeching, almost pleading, and that grounds Wade. The big guy was having trouble here anyway.

He lowers the gun and sits back down.

A second later, the scrawnier boy is herding his friend away, shooting a dark look over his shoulder at them, all four kids out the door. Wade shoves the gun back into his bag and pulls out his wallet, throws a twenty on the table, and nods for Cable to get up. At the very least, the big guy seems to know not to rush. They walk out and follow the street signs to the highway.

It's some spell of silence before Cable speaks. "I'm sorry," is what he says, and it snaps Wade out of his bitter pissy mood so fast he feels a little dizzy with it.

"The fuck are _you_ sorry for," Wade says, cutting a glance at the big idiot. He looks decidedly uncomfortable, unhappy and a little guilty. "I'm the one who couldn't keep his gun in the bag. And it's my face that attracted attention in the first place."

"It's not," Cable says, sighing. "The two boys, they were both annoyed by me before they noticed you. They didn't like the way the girls looked at me."

Huh. "Well, at least two of the four had good taste. How d'you figure that?"

Further discomfort creeps across Cable's expression. "Telepath, remember? That's also why no one called the police. It was easier to suppress that urge than redirect the boy after he'd decided to confront us. I... most of my power has to be used to keep the infection in stasis, but none of these people know how to close their minds. A simple encouragement to mind their own business was easy and didn't require much energy or focus. It would have been simpler if you'd stayed calmer, though."

"Oh," Wade squints, looking up at Cable. "Huh. Well, it'll be easier when we get to a bigger town and I can get us a car. More people means less attention on us. And -- sorry about the gun thing. That was careless."

"It was unnecessary. You could have dealt with him without a weapon, as I'm sure you're well aware."

"Not with you holding my hand," Wade counters, a smile twitching on his lips. "Trust me, I woulda decked him if I'd had freedom of movement. Well, I guess you probably knew that, mind reader."

Cable shakes his head, chuckling. "I can't read you -- I thought you knew. It’s typical with healing factors, in my experience. I only knew you meant to do violence if he didn't leave."

Jesus, what a phrase. _Meant to do violence_ like it was some crooked whim he’d dreamed up sitting there. Wade hitches the bag up on his shoulder and laughs as he shakes his head. “There’s a car slowing down. If they’re cops, can you brain mojo them into leaving us alone?”

"I could," Cable says, and there's an edge of nerves again to that tone, agitation or anxiety Wade can't figure. He knows damn well the big guy can hold his own in a fight, there's no way he's worried about that. And if he's really from the future, chances are he's not got many enemies looking for him now, fewer still who'd be looking for him wearing the face the inducer procured for him. "But they aren't... cops. It's two women, older. They are concerned and mean to offer us assistance."

"Oh, nice. Hitchhiking. Try to look as not axe-murdery as possible. Leave the talking to me."

"Because that went so well for us in the restaurant."

Wade pulls a face at that, but can't really argue. He can hear tires crunching gravel as the car pulls into the breakdown lane behind them, places his hand on Cable's arm and looks at him. "Okay. New plan, smart guy. Tell 'em we're backpackers. I'm sick, we're doing coast to coast backpacking because I'm sick. Play it up, got it. We need help but I'm stubborn. I'll stay over here where I'm less likely to scare them away. And hurry up, cuz the cops _will_  make an appearance sooner or later."

Cable looks uneasy and uncertain to the point that it's almost cute, but before he can argue, one of the women yells from the vehicle, "Are you boys alright?" and Wade just grins and claps Cable's arm a couple times before the big guy comes to some private resolve and nods, turning toward the car.

As promised, Wade does his part, lurking in the background while Cable gestures and speaks briefly with the women in the beat up old Buick. Cable shakes his head and gestures at Wade, waffling one hand in the air, and the woman behind the wheel laughs loud enough Wade can hear her from where he's standing. Cable then nods and smiles, a kind of cute, self-conscious smile that shows no teeth, and steps away from the car, turning toward Wade and gesturing him to come closer.

"Wade, they're heading up to Bangor. It'll take us three days _at least_ to walk it, c'mon."

Like Wade needs to be coaxed. He's a good actor, Cable, and Wade makes a show of seeming to mentally hem and haw a bit before nodding and trudging tiredly over. "You know the whole point of doing the backpacking thing is to, you know, actually walk it, right?" He says, making himself sound grumpy and way more tired than he actually feels.

It's a whole world of shock when Cable grabs his hand and, still smiling that sweet, kind of shy smile, kisses his knuckles. Wade's eyes go wide, he can't help it. "I know you want to do this, but I don't like you having to walk in the damp. And the weather says there's a chance of rain in a few hours."

"Yeah, but," Wade makes a face and gestures at himself with his free hand and then at the car. "They probably -- isn't it like a two hour ride?"

"They said --"

"C'mon, stranger, it's only gonna take longer, you standin' there waverin' on it. Let's get gone, 'fore someone catches us pickin' up hikers."

Cable smiles a little wider, and Wade can see why he's been avoiding it; the inducer does something weird around his mouth when he bares his teeth, making the projected pearly whites look oddly hazy. Probably not enough to notice if you didn't know what to look for or weren't looking long, but still a clue that something's up. His eyes on Wade's are serious but still kind. "It's fine," he mouths, and kisses Wade's knuckles again. The inducer doesn't change the way it feels, cool metal lips brushing Wade's skin, and Wade doesn't have to fake anything when he fidgets and nods, ducking his head to hide colour rising in his face.

The big guy even opens the door for him, closing it once he's inside and jogging around to climb in the other side, thanking the women profusely as they pulled back onto the barren highway.

"You could drop us in the next town," Wade offers, hands tangled in his lap to keep himself from fidgeting. "I really don't wanna be any bother."

"Oh like hell," the woman in the passenger seat says. "You're stuck with us now, young fella, you 'n yer man both. You boys ate yet t'day?"

Cable slides his arm around Wade like it's the most normal thing in the world and shakes his head. "We had some coffee in Beals but he was in too big a hurry to stay for a real meal."

"Well, help yerself to anything we got back there," The woman driving says, making a vague gesture before returning her hand to the steering wheel. "Bev's got snacks she thinks I'm too dumb t' find hid all over th' damn car."

The passenger, presumably Bev, swats the driver with a laughed cuss. "We can feed ya proper when we get t' Bangor. Don't argue it, won't hear different. I make a mean pancake dinner, ‘less you boys pr'fer supper-time fare."

“You don’t need to put yourself through extra trouble,” Cable says, that odd tension creeping back into his tone as he squeezes Wade’s arm. “We don’t want to impose.”

"Well, but… I mean... we could check 'dinner with strangers' off the list that way," Wade says, like he's not already sold on free food. "Yeah, I guess that'd be fine."

And that's how they traveled across half of Maine, hand in hand, pretending to be boyfriends checking boxes off on Wade's bucket list. 

Wade carefully decides not to think of all the ways this could become a big sort of problem.


	4. Get Some Sleep

Bev makes pancakes from scratch in a tiny kitchen in a cute but dim lit and crowded little house in Bangor. She snaps at Wade to get his ass out of her light while she's measuring things into the bowl and Tori, the woman who'd been driving, grabs him by the back of the shirt and physically hauls him out of the room.

It's homey, their little place in central Maine, full of potted plants and the smell of cats. They have two, but Tori tells them, sitting them down in the family room, not to expect to see either.

"Don't like strangers?" Wade asks, dumping his duffel bag loudly at his feet as he settles into the couch. He grins when to woman lofts an eyebrow and says dryly,

"They don't like men."

"Victoria, where the goddamn hell are my oats, woman?" Bev calls from the kitchen, and Wade laughs uproariously when the lady in question cusses under her breath and heaves herself out of the chair -- obviously _her_ spot -- shuffling back through the tables with their vines and tall plants to the kitchen.

Immediately Wade turns to Cable, who is sitting with an expression of what can only be called 'forced calm' and asks him, murmured undertone no less aggressive, "What the fuck?"

Cable doesn't open his eyes. He looks like he's in the middle of some serious zen meditation and Wade idly wonders what would happen if he plopped himself in the man's lap or pulled a gun on him. Nobody who makes themselves look that peaceful is really. "You told me to get us a ride. I played to their sympathies. You were very quick to call me your boyfriend earlier."

Wade scowls and kicks his toe into the side of his bag, nudging it a few inches from where he sits with each kick.

"I know you intended to seduce me when you first arrived on the island," Cable continues and then startles. Wade looks over to see a large white cat settling onto one thick thigh. Cable looks terrified, which is objectively hilarious, but when he turns the look on Wade, pleading, Wade takes pity on him and shoos the cat away, getting his own lap invaded for his trouble. "I didn't think the act would trouble you."

And that's the issue, really, isn't it. The act _doesn’t_ trouble him; he's enjoying Cable pretending to be his caring boyfriend, watching over him as he stubbornly leads the way on some weird cross-country end-of-life celebratory trek. The car ride had been fun, Cable holding his hand, calling him 'sweetheart', seeing him smile in a way that looked for all intents and purposes fully sincere when Wade called him 'babe' right back.

Wade was enjoying himself, which was fine, but he was also _enjoying himself_ , which often leads to him getting hurt.

Sitting there petting the big purring bundle of fur -- doesn't like men Wade's ass -- Wade hums and tries not to think about it too much. They've got bigger things to worry about.

"I can't sleep here," Cable says suddenly, a few minutes later. In the kitchen, Wade can hear the two old women muttering over the sizzle of a hot griddle. "They're going to offer, and I... Wade, I can't. It's too dangerous."

It's mid-afternoon, going on three. It's raining outside, not heavy, just a drizzle, but in the distance Wade's heard a rumble of thunder a few times, promising something heavier.

"We could slip out now..."

Cable goes tight-lipped and still, and Wade can, even with the inducer smoothing those features into something calmer, see the internal debate. "You need to eat. So do I."

A little sigh from Wade, and he scratches at the cat's back a little. "Sad that I'm allergic to cats, and being around them too long aggravates my condition," he says mildly, enjoying the way the big cat stands on his legs to better arch into his hand. "I mean really, really tragic."

The smile on Cable's face is gentle and relieved and Wade endures the gross, warm squirming that smile puts in his chest and lower gut. They sit in silence until Tori sticks her head around the corner from the kitchen and tells them to come eat while the food's hot.

With a jingle of its collar, the cat jumps easily off his lap and trots off into the house while Cable helps him stand up like he needs the extra hand. Wade, impulsive, kisses him on the cheek when he leans down to push Wade's chair in at the table, and it's... nice. It's just nice, for a little while, to pretend that this is normal and they're fine. Cable is, if nothing else, a very good actor.

The four of them sitting close around a small table, pulled out so they’re arranged in a circle with a big stack of pancakes and plates of scrambled eggs and bacon at the center, is homey and nice. In a different universe, Wade would probably get the old ladies’ address so he could send them a thank you or something. They’re sweet, not just with Wade and Cable, but with each other.

When Bev asks if they want to stay the night, Wade feels especially rude blaming the cats -- both of whom have by that juncture taken up residence on the floor by the heating register, laying in a cute little pile -- but the women nod and sigh and insist on at least giving them both an umbrella. It’s work to convince Tori to drop the idea of driving them to the Super 8 in town, but when Wade claims he’s liable to throw up if he gets in a car so soon after eating, the subject is finally dropped.

Stepping out in the cool evening air with Cable, Wade tolerates the hand on the middle of his back guiding him down the stairs, twisting to wave to the ladies standing behind the storm door. He lets that hand stay there until they turn the corner and then he picks up his pace and does a whole-body shake out, shooting Cable a look.

Several times, Cable tries to steer them out of the cute, tree-lined streets and toward the main thoroughfare, but Wade deftly reroutes them back into the neighbourhood streets until Cable finally asks where they're going.

"Lookin' for the haunted house."

The sigh Cable heaves doesn't even pretend to be a human noise. If a computer could turn its fan on just to express annoyance, that's what it would sound like. Wade's not sure why Cable dropping the normal-guy act when they're by themselves pleases him so much, but it does.

"Ghosts aren't real."

"No, no, this one is; I read it in a book once. There's a clown there. I'm hoping not to have to shoot Tim Curry, but Skarsgård is negotiable."

For a moment Cable stops following him, seemingly caught in an attempt to parse out what all Wade was rambling about. It's kind of cute, in a 'I'm alone in the world with no cultural touchstones' kind of way.

Then he says, "I have no idea what you're talking about seventy-five percent of the time."

Wade switches to walking backwards for a bit, still eyeing the houses they pass. He's not exactly joking about what he's looking for, but judging by the irritable, prissy look on Cable's projected face, _he’s_ not joking either. Wade grins and spreads his hands in front of him. "Lookit how pretty all the houses are. Real old, classy type houses. White picket fences, Better Homes and Gardens front yards, even the _trees_ are all trim and proper, right?"

There's faint line between Cable's brows that, even when he's all metal, never quite seems to go away. That line deepens as Cable shifts the strap of the duffle bag on his shoulder and looks grudgingly at the houses, obviously still not getting it. Wade sighs and faces forward again.

"This kind of place always has one. We find it, we don't have to worry about you killing anyone in your sleep, or whatever."

Wade's tone deaf a lot of the time, frustrates even himself with his ability to manipulate his own foot into his own mouth regardless of his intentions. The silence from Cable lasts long enough that Wade's trying to work out a way to walk back his own flippancy, but before he can get anything together even mentally, Cable says slowly, like it's a puzzle he's been working at and still isn't certain he's got the correct end of it, "You're looking for an abandoned house."

Very strange, how relief hits like a punch in the gut at that tone, like knowing Cable's not bothered is it's own sort of prize to walk away with. "Yeah, that's what I've been saying."

Cable grabs him by the wrist, standing still and forcing Wade to stop and, with a put upon groan, turn to face him. It's raining and the umbrellas aren't doing much but making it easier to tell Cable's appearance is a little off -- he still looks completely dry except the hems of his tac pants and some splatter on his tourist-trap tee shirt.

He looks down at Wade, that line between his brows etched in real deep, their umbrellas tipped back against each other, doing very little to protect either of them from the rain, which is freezing. "You would rather stay in the shell of an old house than one of the motels Bev and Tori described? With electricity, a bed... _heat_?"

Put like that, it sounds kind of stupidly altruistic, but all Wade can think to do is shrug a shoulder. "I've slept in some nasty places. And if sleeping at the old ladies' house was a prospect enough to freak you out, I figured walking you into a Holiday Inn was asking for way more trouble than it's worth for like... a mini fridge and shit. You still gotta tell me where you wanna end up, cuz real talk, I'm not doing this song and dance more than once, but tonight? It's raining and I'm tired and full of pancakes and you need a break too. Okay?"

It doesn't _look_ okay. Cable looks about ready to hit someone, or else cry, and Wade's not exactly sure which is more disastrous. But after a second more, Wade's wrist is released and Cable nods, and they go back to wandering, looking for a place to do a little B&E for a bit of R&R.

The house they find is a ramshackle bungalow that was probably the scourge of the neighbourhood even before it fell to disrepair. It's small and squat and the sidewalk out front is cracked, three of the five front windows are boarded over. The door hangs a little crooked, but it's not hard to force it, and judging by the beer cans, the dirty old mattress shoved in a corner, and the abandoned cigarette butts scattered around, the locals already know about that.

Wade whistles, shaking himself of like a dog as Cable dumps the bag on the floor. Too bad Wade hadn't thought to poach a towel from the hotel he'd stayed at down in Boston. Ah, well. Wishes and fishes, again.

The back of Wade's shirt is drier than the front, and when Wade shucks it, he evens things out by drying his face and the back of his head off on the driest bits of the loud Hawaiian print. He's flopped down on the musty-smelling mattresses, trying not to choke on the cloud of dust that flies up when he lays down, when Cable says, "Why are you so willing to help me?"

An unfair question, unjustly breaking the innocent and pleasant silence of the stormy spring evening. Wade scowls, annoyed by Cable's flagrant inability to read the room or his unwillingness to just leave well enough alone. What kind of asshole just asks touchy-feely shit like that straight up, no build-up, no wiggle room for Wade to back-flip the fuck out of this conversation?

"Call it an investment," Wade says, toeing his Crocs off and listening to the satisfying slap of them hitting the floor. "You know, I help you now, you pay me back when you have your shit together. You'll owe me."

When Wade looks, Cable has turned off the image inducer. In the gathering darkness, he's really just a lot of vague grey shapes, massive and looming where he sits on the other side of the room, back against a wall that has so many holes knocked in it Wade's surprised it's still standing at all. "You're very... considerate, especially of _my_ needs. For a man who claims to be so self-interested."

"Yeah, I'm a really great guy. Save kittens from trees on my days off, donate my dirty money to discrete but reputable charities." Wade does his best to keep bitterness out of his tone, making it sound like a snappy joke rather than the conversational shut-down it's meant to be. "I'm told I'm a generous lover too."

"It would not surprise me," Cable says flatly, like the joke hadn't scanned for him at all. Wade wishes he had a pillow so he could scream into it. He also wishes that whatever the hell warm tense feeling it is that keeps taking over his gut and heart would just knock it off.

Flopping onto his side, he drags the heavy bag across the floor and digs his phone out of it, squinting at the brightness and tapping into the browser. A few seconds on Google is enough to answer his first, most pressing question, and a few seconds more gives him everything else he’d need. At the very least, Cable seems to take his sudden silence for what it is, and doesn’t try to carry on his previous line of conversation.

“Please _God_ tell me you don’t snore, I really don’t need to know what robo-snores sound like.”

In the dark, he can’t see Cable’s face beyond the dimmed glow of his Lite Brite eye, certainly can’t see him in enough detail to know what, if any, expression he might be wearing. Somehow he knows he’s smiling anyway, that faint, kind of gentle, soft-on-the-edges smile. “I’ve never had any complaints,” he says simply, and Wade can hear him settle back against the wall.

In the dark, with his phone off and Cable’s eye closed or off or, fuck if Wade knows, covered up, Wade can hear a lot of things. He can hear the soft slide of metal over metal, the parts of Cable that he’d seen thus far always in motion and feeling the air around him probably taking advantage of him not having the inducer up and doing their usual thing. Further away, he can hear rain drumming the roof, can hear it dripping in a few places around the room. When the wind gusts up high, he hears the house groan against it, and when he rolls to settle on one side with his hand curled under his cheek, he can hear the mattress squeak and complain.

In the dark, long enough after they’ve both been quiet enough for Wade to assume Cable is asleep, he feels the size of the old, dusty, definitely questionably clean mattress. Big enough it would have been easy to share, if the act Cable had been putting on while they’d been in the old ladies’ company had been sourced in anything genuine. It would have been a little tight, because Cable was built like a fucking tank, but not so bad. They’d probably have been warm, at least.

Wade wants to blame the sheer length of time it’s been since anyone slept -- not even fucked, just _slept_ \-- with him. He wants to blame his own loneliness and nothing more for the hollow sting in his centre, the sense of disappointment and the bitter anger that comes with it, all aimed inwards. He’s used enough to his own highs and lows to know this mood will pass, likely by the time he wakes up, but laying in the quiet dark it feels oppressive and very, very real.

He’s half asleep, vaguely aware that he’s drooling on the pillow of his own hand, when he thinks he hears Cable’s voice. “Thank you,” he thinks he hears, and then he’s out, swept away in the white noise of rain on a leaky old roof.

In the morning, he finds Cable sitting, inducer still off but his body drawn into as firmly human a shape as possible, no stray tendrils feeling the air, no cables or cords out of place. With his eyes closed, he looks serene, and Wade would think he was sleeping if he weren’t floating about a foot and a half in the air.

Watching for a minute, Wade doesn’t move. If he moves, the mattress will creak and give him away. A spark of mischievousness flares in him and he moves his arms carefully, keeping otherwise still to minimize telling noises, and then he claps sharply, breaking the silence. Cable doesn’t gasp, but his eyes flash open and he drops several inches, catches himself, and then falls the rest of the way.

“Up and at ‘em, sunshine, we gotta get to the airport.”

The look he gets is half venomous and half nervous, Cable’s ever present unease at the idea of being in a crowd warring with his irritation at Wade’s amusement.

“Pack up the sour face, Prissy, I’m not gonna stick you on a commercial flight, what d’you think I am? A monster? We’re gonna steal a car outta long term.”

It’s fun, Wade decides, watching the impossibility of solid metal twitching in nuanced expressions. And Cable looking at him like _that_ \-- like he’s both the most frustrating bastard and at the same time the most brilliant, and either way, like he can’t help being fond of him -- is worth the realization that it’s not dark in here anymore and he’s not wearing a shirt.

Shrugging his way into the ugly Hawaiian thing, which is still damp and now chilly on top of it, he makes a ‘hurry up gesture’ at Cable, still sitting where he’d fallen. “Candy ass up. Human face on. Let’s go, before one of us dies of old age.”

For a laugh that sounds like someone going ham on a dot matrix printer, Wade’s quickly become pretty fond of it. When he holds a hand out to Cable, Cable takes it and hauls himself up, and it’s all Wade can do to keep his feet. The guy is _heavy_ , it’s hard to believe he can float that way.

“Sleep good?” Wade asks, as they cross the street and follow the walking directions he’d pulled from Google last night. “Me I slept like a _baby_ , no clowns at all.”

Cable makes an inquiring noise, but when Wade doesn’t clarify he simply says, “I meditated. For now, that’s enough.”

It sounds very self-sacrificing to Wade, and he can’t help making a bit of a face, swinging his umbrella as he walks. Cable had insisted on carrying the bag again, and Wade hadn’t argued, but the clouds were still low and promised rain sometime before lunch. “You still got, like, a human meat brain, right?”

“Yes, Wade,” Cable says patiently, but Wade can feel in the underlying notes of the tone the way he’s looking around to make sure no one’s going to overhear.

“Well, I mean, biology was never my subject, but I seem to recall sleep being important in making sure we don’t go all,” he waggles his fingers toward his temples, rolling his eyes and sticking his tongue out, turning to walk backwards again so he can give Cable to full effect. “Sleep good for brains. We were safe there as we’re gonna be anywhere else.”

“The houses on either side of us were occupied.” Cable says flatly. “The one to the west had two young children; to the east, an old man whose wife passed a year ago. I couldn’t afford to slip, and I’m not… certain yet that I’ll feel the TO attempt to creep again while I sleep. I can’t lose control again.”

It takes Wade a moment to process all of that. For a few minutes, they walk quietly. According to the directions, it’d take better than an hour to walk to the airport, and Wade wasn’t going to do that in silence. “So you’re telling me you haven’t slept… since when? When did you last sleep?”

“I’ve meditated every night since you helped me regain control,” Cable says, like that’s an answer and also reasonable. “I’m not at any risk of collapse or any negative physical effects of exhaustion.”

Wade lets one brow ride up high. “Okay, and all the like, not physical effects?”

“Please drop it, Wade,” Cable says softly, and Wade wants to needle -- _too tired to debate?_ \-- but he’s not entirely without mercy. And after a minute or so, Cable says, “When we have a vehicle… and we’re in sufficiently deserted surroundings. If it makes you feel better, then yes, I will sleep.”

And that’s funny, isn’t it, the way that makes Wade feel all warm and pleased again. He laughs and swings his umbrella and steps a little faster.

“Well then, pick up the pace, T-800. We’ll find something with plenty of legroom. And a moon roof!”

Behind him, he can hear the low, grinding chuckle as Cable shakes his head. “I’ll take anything that runs at this point.”

Easy to please.

Wade can just about work with that.


	5. Anything You Need

Stealing the car is way easier than fiction would make it out to be, because people are way more trusting and vulnerable than they would ever, even in fiction, admit to being. The hardest part is actually getting Cable on the shuttle bus that takes them from the airport proper to the long term parking lot, but even with him sitting hunched up and obviously discomfited by the proximity of so many other people, it's not so much of a struggle. If they wouldn't have been conspicuous as all hell walking the airport service roads, Wade wouldn't even have bothered with the bus at all.

Five minutes after strolling into the lot, they find a pale blue Dodge pick-up with New Hampshire plates that looks like it's been rusting in this spot for a while. The doors are unlocked. Wade makes some disgusted noises about the long scratch and traded paint on the driver's side as he pulls open the door and slides behind the wheel.

Cable sits next to him and looks expectantly as Wade settles in with a little wiggle and grips the wheel.

"Got a drill?" Wade asks, rooting around in the duffel bag for his toolkit. "I never think to bring power tools. Which is silly, power tools are  _so_ fun in my line of work." Glancing up, Cable is still just looking at him. "Jesus, have you never stolen a car? I know you don't have a drill, robo-boy, the implication is that you're gonna use your cool robot tentacle powers to do what I can't."

He gets a blink for his trouble, like Cable thinks he's cute or something. Absolutely obnoxious. What was the world coming to these days, grown men not knowing how to hot wire a damn truck.

"You. Tentacle. Here." He points at the keyhole on the steering column, tapping the metal with his nail twice before Cable reaches toward it. Wade's a little surprised, which is stupid because he _knows_ Cable is using an image inducer, to see a thin metal cord press against the keyhole. He nods, feeling like the world's more questionable teacher. "Go in about two-thirds of the way up from the bottom, yep, right there. We're breakin' the lock pins, so you only need to go about this deep." Fingers held about two inches apart.

When Cable pauses and looks at him again for further instruction, Wade grins and waves for him to sit back, holding up the screwdriver from his toolkit. "Buckle your seat belt, buddy boy, we're in business."

It's like magic. Wade thinks, as the engine rumbles to life, that he really _should_ invest in a power drill. He can think of a dozen practical uses just off the top of his head, but having a cyborg pal was just about as good. Wade's not even sour about paying the parking fee on the way out. Less than three hundred bucks for a new-to-him truck was, quite literally, a steal.

Wade fiddles with the radio as he drives, drumming on the steering wheel, playing with the windows, yammering about whatever occurs to him. Cable never tells him to be quiet, or watch the road, or focus. If Wade weren't perfectly aware of who he was and the effect he inevitably has on people, he'd almost think Cable enjoyed listening to him.

"So," he says after a while, aiming them west and wishing he'd chosen something new enough to have cruise control. "I'm figuring New York?"

Cable looks mildly alarmed, which Wade has kind of expected but had hoped would prove to have faded a little. "Why New York?" Cable says tensely, and when Wade glances down he can see Cable's got his fingers tangled tight in his lap, tight enough that the flesh ones probably hurt.

Shrugging a shoulder, Wade returns his attention to the highway. "Well, I mean. Time traveling future man hightails it to the past. That kind of big event usually ties into one of the big franchises. Avengers is big; that's New York City. X-Men seems more likely, what with the cool deus ex machina with the telekinetic mind read-y powers." Wade cocks what would be an eyebrow, looking at Cable again. "How 'm I doing?"

The sense of tentative relief, like a collective unclench, wafts off Cable as he manufactures a sigh. "If... the situation were not as it is, then... you would be correct. I intended to seek out the X-Men first. I had... meant to assist them."

Wade nods, pleased as he always is when his deductions are correct. "Okay, so Westchester, here we come, right?"

An immediate return of tension, Cable's frown when Wade sees it something more sad than anything. He looks downright anguished, like Wade's suggested they go visit the graves of every puppy ever killed for dramatic effect in storytelling. Or Iowa.

"C'mon, it's not like you won't fit in. They’ve _got_ a big metal guy already," Wade elbows Cable playfully, attempting to lighten the mood. "I mean, fair warning, they don't like _me_ , but they love mutants and you're _definitely_ not a villain, what with the self-sacrifice habit and the massive guilt complex and so on. The Professor probably has a bed all made up for you and everything."

Cable's eyes finally lift from his lap, and this close, Wade can easily tell which is 'real' and which is just the inducer. The hologram does a fair job of replicating finer emotion; there's even a little red on the edges like Cable's close to tears, but the eye on the right, the one what would be human-looking even with the inducer removed, is alive with a kind of tormented conflict, a kind of pain, that can only be achieved organically.

"I can't let them see me like this," Cable says softly. "Wade, I can't."

Facing back forward, Wade realizes he's been steadily increasing their speed and is now going about twenty miles over the speed limit. He exhales and eases off the gas before coming up with another smile. "Look, I know it doesn't mean a ton coming from a guy who looks like what would happen if they remade The Fly but instead of a fly it was a pepperoni pizza, but you _really_ don't look that bad. With or without the inducer."

"That isn't -- Wade, they'll know what I've done. I can't... face them. Not yet. Not... not like this."

Wade's brow draws together, trying to work through the sentiment. Time traveler. Obviously a mutant. "Okay, so which X-Man is your parent? Grandparent. Ancestor of negotiable generational value. I'm realizing you haven't told me that much about yourself _at all_."

Looking miserable, Cable shakes his head. "I had meant to arrive much earlier. Years earlier. Time travel isn't exact, our tech is very primitive in a number of ways. So much had to be rebuilt, or rediscovered, or relearned. I believe there are some groups with more reliable tech in your present than mine."

"Cool. Doesn't answer my question." Wade glances again, sees a sour look on Cable's face in the reflection of the passenger window. "Okay, I can guess. Uuuh, I'm gonna rule out Logan because talk about _predictable_. Hmm. So few compelling leads. You're a psychic, but god knows Xavier isn't knocking anyone up these days. You're old so it's gotta be one of the younger guys if they're your _parent_..."

A sigh that is strictly performative from Cable. His breath fogs the window, his forehead resting on the glass. Wade thinks about continuing to poke, if only to have something to call Cable other than a name other people picked out to code-name a monster. But again, Wade does have some small measure of mercy in his heart, a weakness that's certain to get him hurt in a number of fun and exciting ways in the future.

He decides the guessing game can be put off for a while. "Okay, so no X-Men. You're not gonna want to go to NYC because, duh, eight million people, no naps, too stressful. So where _do_ you want to go?"

In the reflection of the window, Cable's expression is tired and sad. Wade wonders if Logan _is_ his dad-slash-grandpa-slash-ancestor; he's certainly got the compelling, sorrowful brooding thing down. "I... you're right. I should speak with the X-Men, Xavier at the very least. I had just hoped..." He gives a tired noise, something close to a laugh but not quite there. "My parents sent me to the future when I was very young. I haven't seen them in person since before I was old enough to form concrete memories. I know them only through stories. The idea of meeting them now, when I can't safely even sleep... when I'm..."

Without thinking, Wade pats the larger man on the shoulder, firm and reassuring. "Hey, running from problems and postponing having to disappoint your parents is a time-honored and frankly underrated tradition. Honestly it's a massive part of growing up."

Cable makes another noise, more amused than before but still not even fully what Wade would deign call a chuckle. "I suppose I wouldn't know. What do you suggest then, Wade?"

Both hands back on the wheel, Wade rolls the idea, the problem and all its blank spots and many facets, around in his brain. "I hear Nevada's nice this time of year."

The conversation peters out for a while, Wade chattering at the radio, singing when something he knows (or thinks he knows) comes on. Cable’s hands remain clenched together in his lap for a long time.

After their second fill-up, during which Wade ran into the gas station for snacks and to visit the horror show that was a gas station restroom off I-90, Cable offers to drive. He’d been squirrely about getting out of the car at the first stop, but after six continuous hours of riding along with Wade, he seemed to have finally let go of whatever was eating at him. Wade slid into the passenger seat and solemnly passed him the screwdriver that served as their key.

“I’m trusting that your license is up to date, Mr. Future.”

“Why?” Cable asked, actually grinning as he guided them back onto the interstate. As soon as they cleared the entrance ramp, he forced his way into the fast lane and took off. “It’s not like I intend to let us get caught.”

Cable is an offensive but competent driver. He drives like he’s heading into war, leaning over the steering wheel a little and glaring through the windshield. Wade wishes he could get his legs up on the dashboard, but there’s not quite enough room to maneuver it and, he suspects, were he to manage it wouldn’t be comfortable. They drive into the setting sun with little interruption, Wade offering Cable the occasional bit of jerky along with his driving advice.

The thing is, Wade knows himself exactly well enough to recognize why he’s having so much fun. Why he hasn’t pulled the plug on this even when Cable gets moody and weird. Cable hasn’t touched him since the previous evening when they were walking the streets looking for an abandoned house in a quiet neighbourhood, but there’s… a certain something in the way he sneaks glances at Wade while he’s driving, and the way he flinches just a little still when Wade reaches out and touches _him_.

It’s a something that says to Wade that he’s alone and afraid of being more alone. Wade’s the only person he trusts himself around, which Wade kind of understands -- after all, Wade’s considerably more difficult to kill than most. Cable has a way about him that makes him hard to know as a person, a way Wade remembers from way back. People who’ve lost a lot get that way, where they want friends, or at least people to be _friendly_ with, but they don’t want to get close. They share surface stuff but never go deep, because then if _they’re_ the one who dies or disappears, no one else has much to miss at all.

Wade was never good at that shit. Wade likes being close to people, Wade likes being _known_. He’s always been loud and obnoxious and gets in people’s faces so they have no choice at all but to remember him. He’s working against a lot anymore, being brooding and mysterious just makes people less likely to stick around.

With Cable, a guy so wrapped up trying not to get hurt or hurt anyone else that he hasn’t even given Wade his _name_ , Wade’s not only fighting his own tendency to latch on to anyone who’s nice to him for two minutes (which, put that plainly, sounds _mucho_ pathetic) but the part of him that loves cracking tough nuts like Cable open.

And that obvious innuendo-bait leads to the _other_ issue, which is that, inducer on or inducer off, Cable is just… oh just about everything wet dreams are made of, as far as Wade’s concerned. Stoic but still nice, built like a goddamn brick shit house, expressive eyes (eye? eyes?), the way he laughs like it’s being shocked out of him every time…

Yeah, Wade’s got it bad, and it’s not just general horniness anymore. He’s invested. The plan, rudimentary as Wade’s plans always are, had been to haul the monster-revealed-to-be-mutant in to talk to the X-Men and waltz back out of this tie-in with the same kind of vague dissatisfaction that always comes with an unfulfilled hook-up attempt.

It wasn’t that easy. Shit was _never_ that easy, and Wade’s starting to think this isn’t an X-Men cameo he’s featuring in at all.

They hit a clear patch of sky around midnight and Wade suggests they pull over. The road is about empty, this late, middle of the week, at the beginning of April. They’re somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Illinois, not a headlight or taillight to be seen. Cable says he’s fine to keep going and Wade laughs.

“Why rush?” He asks, drawing one brow up and taking a bite off the strip of jerky he’s been working for half an hour or so. “You got a hot date at the end of this?”

And there’s something, really, in the way Cable pauses, thinking or processing, before putting the turn signal on and guiding them onto the next exit ramp, onto some rural highway. “You tell me,” he says, focusing on the curve of the ramp.

Wade thinks about saying something lewd and ultimately refrains. It’s  a rare show of self control for him, and when Cable parks them on the edge of a recently tilled field, the air smelling of dirt and plants and, faintly, of cow, he hops wordlessly out of the cab and climbs into the bed of the truck. He listens to the gentle thud of the driver side door shutting -- Cable touches the truck like he thinks he’s going to break _it_ , too -- and then tracks the crunch of dirt and gravel under Cable’s feet, smiling up at the sky as Cable climbs into the bed with him and lays beside him.

They are very carefully not touching until Wade turns onto his side and says, “You put out a lot of mixed signals, monster-man.”

Cable turns, not fully onto his side but with his weight leaned more toward Wade than away, that line drawing deep again between his eyebrows. In the starlight, the image inducer flickers, like he’s not sure he wants to keep it on or not. “I don’t want to hurt you again,” he says simply, and there’s that warm, tight feeling in Wade’s chest again, like fucking clockwork. “Just because you can’t die doesn’t mean you deserve to be hurt.”

“Nah,” Wade says breezily, and when he kisses Cable the hologram disappears at last, leaving them alone in the dark. Cable is tentative at first, but that’s worlds better than throwing Wade out of the truck or seizing up entirely. He flinches like he’s been stabbed when Wade tries to nip at his lips, feeling his teeth skate off the gentle curve of them even as Cable makes a hungry little sound and finally _touches_ him.

The hand resting at the edge of his jaw is cool and firm, touching like he’s delicate, like he needs someone to be kind to him. Wade’s not sure if he’s flattered or insulted, and bites at those smooth lips again, delighted when they part with a soft, static-y sigh. For a moment they just stay close, breathing each other’s air, Wade’s hand on Cable’s bicep, feeling the littlest tendrils wriggle against his palm.

Cable’s teeth really are like knives, just as sharp as Wade had hoped, so when he pushes his tongue into that mouth, they both taste blood. The grip of the hand angling his jaw tightens; the weird little tentacle movements go still as Cable pulls carefully back.

“Fuck,” he grumbles, ashamed and concerned, “I’m gonna cut you to ribbons.”

Wade doesn’t want him ashamed, doesn’t want worry or hesitancy, so he digs his fingers against that thick arm, reveling in the way the metal still somehow yields to his grip. “It’s so cute that you think I give a shit.”

Diving back into the kiss, Wade worms himself closer, tasting the inside of Cable’s mouth. Unsurprisingly, it’s a bit like licking a bunch of wet quarters, sharply metallic with the edge of razor sharp teeth thrown in. Cable clearly produces some kind of saliva equivalent, something slick and wet when his tongue at last rolls against Wade’s own.

Languid makeouts haven’t really been part of Wade’s scene in a long time. Anyone who could stand being around him long enough to have any interest in physical romance-oriented gestures generally wanted it either fast and hard, or wanted him to keep the mask on. Sometimes both. At this point, it barely hurts Wade’s feelings at all.

There’s no rush behind Cable’s actions. It’s very clear in the gentle way he moves that he’s focused more on being careful with Wade than he is about getting either of them off. It’s almost novel; Wade’s not sure anyone has ever kissed him just for the sake of laying around and kissing; there’s always been more attached. Sex or a message or that particular kind of mockery attractive people show sometimes.

The taste of blood lingers between them, Wade’s lip splitting and healing several times, his tongue cut several more. Wade doesn’t mind. Even the bright points of pain are pretty good like this, part and parcel of it, just like the wriggly things under his hand and the cool, unshakable firmness of the hand resting against his neck.

It’s a long time before Cable pulls away, sighing softly. It’s not a sad sound, this time; it’s like when you’ve finally gotten a long, cool drink of water after a long, hot run. Satisfied and deeply pleased in a fundamental way. Cable’s eyes blink open again, nearly blinding Wade with the brightness of the light-up one, and he smiles a little smugly when Wade rears back at the sudden flare.

“I think we should get going,” he says quietly, and hushed like that, his voice sounds more electronic than ever. His thumb strokes a slow stripe up and down, tracing the joint of jaw and throat. “I need… to take this slow. However tempting you make it. Is that okay?”

Wade laughs, rolling onto his back again so he can bark the sound at the stars. “The hot older guy wants to know if it’s okay if we take it slow. Jesus.” He looks back at Cable, chuckling again at the expectant calm on his face. He shakes his head and ducks in for another kiss, gentle this time. “Yeah. Guess I ain’t got anything else goin’ on.”

The image inducer flickers back into place and the truck groans soft complaints as they both hop back out and climb into the cab. Wade waits until Cable’s situated to say, “You sure you’re safe to drive, No-Doz? Should I take your screwdriver?”

Starting the truck and turning them in a wide U, Cable smiles. It’s a good smile, and even from profile, Wade can tell that groove between his brows will have smoothed out. “Shut up,” he says, and it’s the fondest anyone’s ever told him to shut up, Wade’s sure. “Get some rest for both of us.”


	6. Shinin' Down (Like Water)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please check the updated tags before proceeding.

Shockingly, despite the fact that Cable drives like they're in a high speed chase and Wade looks like every stereotype of 'disfigured villain' that's ever happened rolled together and burned to a fine crisp, they don't run into trouble until some time after they cross the state line between Utah and Nevada.

Wade still thinks Nevada was a solid choice. Deserts are far from lifeless, but there's a hell of a lot less for Cable to infect if he has a control slip, and he seems to relax considerably when Wade makes it clear they're not heading for Vegas or through to California. In fact, somewhere in the western end of Utah, Cable asks -- _asks_ , it's actually kind of cute -- if Wade will drive for a while so he can close his eyes for a bit.

It's unclear if what he does in the passenger seat is really sleep, because Wade's got no reference. He could be meditating still, but Wade considerately turns the radio down  and keeps his chatter to a dull roar. The truck, given its age and the amount of distance they've asked it to go, handles really well, even if the passenger door sounds like it's about ready to come off its hinges.

Cable wakes up, or at least opens his eyes, with the sun rising behind them and Wade fiddling with trying to glance at the GPS on his phone. He solves the issue by holding the phone for Wade, without either of them saying a word on the matter.

He _does_ make a face when he sees the destination, and Wade supposes even the future must know the great American superstore. "Why are you headed for a Walmart?"

Wade gives him a grin, knows it looks somewhere between goofy and cool with the big aviator shades he'd nabbed at the last truck stop. "Well, there are certain survival techniques we could employ to survive in the desert for however long you wanna tough it out wild-style, but personally I hate drinking my piss and I'm not a fan of starvation _or_ autocannibalism without like, strict negotiation."

The look he gets is flat, brows drawn tight again. Wade wants to lean over and kiss that stupid line, and laughs, shaking his head as he looks back at the road.

"We're getting camping supplies, you dingdong. There's no abandoned houses to break into in the middle of the Mohave or wherever the fuck we are."

That seems to settle the big guy a little, but Wade can see the way his hands tangle together in his lap. He's good at keeping a blank face, but his body language gives everything away to anyone paying even a lick of attention. Wade reaches out and pats his knee, rapping his knuckles awkwardly on the glove box door to do so.

"It's a big store but it's in the middle of Fuck Off, Nevada. It's not gonna be a big crowd, and if it is, then you can stay in the truck or we can drive off and figure something else out. But my ready money is running thin and cash spreads at Walmart. Plus, we could both use a change of clothes and a real leg stretch."

"You don't have to justify --"

Without thinking, Wade slaps Cable's knee, immediately regretting it when his fingers crunch against metal. "Listen," he says shaking the pain out of his hand. "I'm running my mouth to help you understand none of this is putting me out and I'm not doing it because I'm an idiot. I'm communicating with you, which I _do_ know is a foreign concept to you, but it's _manners_. Okay?"

His hand is swallowed in Cable's, and the metal lips pressed to the faint sting in his fingers from where he's struck that too-solid knee are gentle and soft. "Okay," is all Cable says, squeezing Wade's hand gently before releasing him. It's weird, how sometimes gentle things make Wade feel like more of a jerk than being punched in the face or snarled at ever could.

The parking lot is fairly empty, given the early hour and general low population of the area. Wade unbuckles his seat belt and turns to look at Cable before they get out. "I'm giving you this," he says, handing over the screwdriver that has been their key the last three days of driving. "I don't think we're going to have a problem here, but if we _do_ , you haul ass. Get outta the store and get out of here. There's a town a couple hours away, it’s called Carp, like the fish. Real small. Anything happens, find me there. Got it?"

Cable nods solemnly, wrapping his larger hand over Wade's, tugging him close so he can kiss Wade's forehead. "Okay," he says simply, releasing Wade and pocketing the screwdriver as he gets out of the truck.

And really, it's supposed to be simple. A Walmart run. Not much could be simpler.

Later, running from the sound of sirens and the impressive carnage, Wade will remember that any time he thinks something is simple, it’s just foreshadowing for the storyline’s biggest clusterfuck.

Wade’s pushing their cart through the menswear section, trying to eyeball what size Cable’s giant body requires and lamenting that the really _cool_ shirts never seem to come above a XL, when Cable wraps a hand around his arm, just above the elbow, and yanks him close, speaking softly against his ear. It’d be kinda sexy if this wasn’t Walmart and the words weren’t what they are.

“There are men entering the building. They have guns.”

Wade tries to laugh it off. “Oh, sweetie, I’ll teach you all about American gun politics later but this _is_ Nevada. Gun laws so lax if you blink, you --”

A gentle squeeze on his arm shuts him up. Cable continues, insistent, and Wade quickly understands why.

“There are eight of them. The man they seem to see as leader was fired from this company several weeks ago for some kind of inappropriate behaviour toward a customer. He blames the manager currently on duty, a woman who is pregnant.”

“Well, that sounds bad.”

A nod, Cable’s face taut. He looks strained and distressed again. “Each man has some type of assault rifle as well as a handgun. The leader also has a number of combat knives.”

“Fuck." Wade huffs, resigned. "Okay, head for the truck.”

“Wade, they mean to kill anyone they come across. And they mean to do worse to that woman before executing her.”

Wade sighs, wishing the Deadpool suit weren’t balled up in a duffel bag with the rest of his shit. “Yeah, I figured,” he grumbles, twisting around to get a fistful of Cable’s shirt and yanking him down for a brief kiss. Somewhere toward the front of the store, someone screams, the sound answered by a burst of gunfire. “Carp, remember? Get your big ass in gear, and be careful.”

Cable looks torn, uncertain, even as Wade’s pulling away and pushing the cart, loaded with so many things they’re now going to just have to do without, into a rack of clothing. “Wade, are you --”

Grabbing the closet tee-shirt, Wade rips his horrible Hawaiian special off. Like hell is he dying, even temporarily, in a gag shirt. “Babe, you get --” another burst of gunfire, commotion in full swing at the front of the store now. “You get one see-you-later kiss, and I already gave it. Get gone. I hate working with an audience.”

There’s an electric sort of shock when one of Cable’s tentacles, thick and metal, peels away from the induced image of his human self and grabs Wade by the wrist, hauling him back. Cable kisses him like a guy who expects never to have the privilege again, fierce enough that Wade can feel blood smearing between them from his torn lips.

When Cable lets him go, he still looks anguished, but he nods as Wade finishes pulling his stolen shirt down and turns away without another word, running toward the garden center.

Stealth, Wade thinks, doesn't come naturally to most people. It's always an effort, and when you have a healing factor, the muscles trained up to assist with stealth start to go soft with lack of use. Who needs to sneak around when the bad guys (or, occasionally, the good guys) can't do anything that sticks?

It's also, like all muscle-memory, impossible to quite forget.

Wade knows he's got to be sneaky in a situation like this, at least a little, because with hostages -- and every other customer in the store is some kind of hostage, if disposable to the bad guys in this particular case -- there's always a chance of someone innocent getting hurt (or dead) instead of him. And if he's too loud before he gets the drop on the guys with the assault rifles, they're liable to injure him bad enough that he won't be able to kill them as fast as he's going to have to, once the killing starts.

Creeping through the store toward the front, where the screaming had been coming from, Wade is careful to move quickly and quietly. Thank god for all that military training and years and years of work as a merc, or this could be super difficult. He really, really wants to hum the Mission Impossible theme, but that's not really in the spirit of stealth.

Mentally, he lets himself.

The first bad guy he finds is a middle aged fuck with camo paint on his face. Camo, like he thinks he's storming a fuckin' forest stronghold. It's not even desert camo, which Wade could have forgiven, it's plain old green-grey-black camo. The man has, unsurprisingly, been shot in the leg and left behind by his idiot friends, three civilians scattered on the ground around him while he clutches his thigh and whimpers manfully.

Wade comes up behind him and breaks his neck for him while telling him he's a fucknut. The words aren't necessary; the guy's dead before he finishes saying them. They make Wade feel better, though, and he liberates the man's Ruger 10/22, which he will delight in informing Mr. Mind Reader is _not_ an assault rifle at all.

As he's slinging it over his shoulder, humming out loud now because he's only _human_ , damnit, some things just can't be helped, he hears a very soft sobbing sound. Very quickly, he zeroes in on the source; a little girl hiding in a rack of kid's fancy-dress clothes. He feels a sort of familiar gut-sinking feeling, seeing the wide-eyed look of terror on her face, watching him pick the pockets of a dead guy in search of extra ammo.

He raises a finger to his lips, knowing he's far from the friendly face she needs, and gestures for her to stay hidden. When she nods hurriedly, he gives her a thumbs up and leaves, resolved to kill the rest of the fucknuts as violently as speed allows. Speed is paramount to resolving his own bright anger, now.

The second living adult he comes across is a chubby man who's been shot in the shoulder. He's wearing a Walmart employee vest and, when he sees the gun on Wade's shoulder, looks about ready to faint. Wade raises his gnarled hands and wishes yet again that he still had the image inducer. People were less inclined to be terrified of him when he didn't look like an extra from The Walking Dead.

"Where'd the shitheels with the guns go," he asks, crouching at the man's side. The guy gasps wetly, eyes rolling wildly. Wade huffs. "Buddy, this is super important. Guys, guns, where go?"

"C-cuh-customer service," the fallen man manages, nodding his head beyond the bay of registers. Wade starts to stand and the guy grabs him. "They all got guns, man. They're shooting everyone, they shot Ashley they --"

Gently prying the hand off his wrist, Wade pats the back of it as he pushes it to the man's chest. His name tag reads 'Richard'. "Don't worry 'bout a thing, Dicky. They ain't got enough bullets for me."

Whether that calms the poor guy is up for debate, but Wade doesn’t have time to waste worrying about it as he makes for the aforementioned desk. There's a number of dead people on the way there, one of whom is a young woman, also in an employee vest, shot at her register. She’s riddled with holes from the waist up, the kind of job that’s going to require a closed casket. The sight makes Wade yet angrier, and when he gets behind the service desk, he can hear more screaming up stairs, beyond the employee-only gate.

He thinks Walmart will forgive him for crossing the barrier in this particular case, and takes the stairs two or three at a time.

There's more bodies upstairs. Most of them are wearing nice shirts and slacks. Several are floor worker employees in their uniform vest, people who had tried to run to the only safe place on hand.

Wade might not be the most practiced at the kind of ninja stealth he'd once prided himself in, back in the days before Weapon X, but in this kind of hunt-kill thing, he's no slouch. He'd always excelled at hostage rescue because, impulsive and sharp as he could be, he had an eye for detail. Wade didn't shoot by mistake; he always meant it when he pulled the trigger.

The upstairs employee area looks like an office building, if that office had one floor and was just a square hall that looped back to the stairs. There's conference rooms, even, the wooden doors perforated with bullet holes now. Wade doesn't check inside; the bad guys are making plenty of noise and if there's anyone in those rooms they're quiet, for one reason or another.

He stays low and moves quick, mowing the legs out from the first guy he sees in Army Surplus trousers tucked into his boots. The guy screams; his buddy whips around and gets shot in the face. Wade shoots fucknut #1 in the head as he steps over fucknut #2, continuing up the hallway. He can hear several people screaming, the fearful shrieks of hostages and the angry, self-important shouting of the militant assholes.

Counting the first guy, the one who's gun Wade had borrowed, that leaves five men left. Peeking around a corner to the back-most hallways, Wade sees a pair of men with semi-automatic rifles looking uncertain outside a room with a shut door. Relegated to guard duty and not happy about it, given the fact that at this point they have to have heard him shooting their friends. He notes that neither of _them_ have wrong-region-camo grease paint on their faces before one of them notice him looking around the corner and shoots at him.

Whipping back around the corner, Wade still gets a spray of drywall on him, grits his teeth, holds, and then lurches 'round the corner, squeezing off a quick shot, taking the closer man in the gut. He drops, the other one trips on him and fires wildly, missing Wade and spraying the wall. Several someones on the other side scream wildly; Wade keeps moving. Fucknut #3 gets shot in the head just to stop his mewling bitch whining; fucknut #4 he hits in the face with the butt of his gun, kicks the semi-auto out of his hand, and then shoots him in the head twice. Because he's getting angrier, and shooting people makes him feel better.

Dropping the first borrowed gun, he scoops up #4's, pivots, kicks open the guarded door, and is immediately shot in the chest.

It hurts. Getting shot always hurts. The force of it also slams Wade backward into the wall, another shot just missing his head. Wade snarls, pushing off the wall and shoots the other guy with the gun, who he elects to dub fucknut #5, because the theme has worked thus far. He shoots the guy until his clip is empty.

"This was a new fucking shirt," he snarls at the body, before noticing the woman curled up behind the desk. She's got a black eye and a bloody nose and will probably need therapy for the rest of her life, but the rest of her looks okay. Wade pivots again, sweeping the room.

"Now, I know I'm not _that_ bad at math," he says. "Six away from eight leaves two. There should be two more fucknuts. Ma'am, have you seen two more militant fucknuts?"

The woman has scrambled across the room to fumble the handgun from #5's holster, aiming it at Wade. Or possibly behind him. Wade whips around again -- he's thinking he's going to end up dizzy as he does it -- lifting his gun (empty, but effective as a prop) and taking a shot to the shoulder, the neck, the center of his forehead.

Someone screams. Sounds like a lady. Wade tries to pull the trigger on his own gun, vision still perfectly clear where blood's not running into his eye, but of course his weapon is empty. He needs a minute. Head wounds always take a second, make him sluggish for a bit. He stumbles forward, hears someone shout his name.

That's funny. He's not wearing a name tag.

He's on his knees, and it's a real effort to look up at the guy with the gun, fucknut number... well that's six or is it seven? It's getting harder to navigate his own counting system. Was the camo-faced idiot numbered in the fucknut count?

Anyway, number whatever sprouts a hole in his neck, something long and metal tearing through from behind him, tossing him aside. His body dents the wall, boots leaving dark marks. Wade chuckles, blinking, trying to keep his own hands around the gun as his healing factor sorts through the penetrating brain damage and other perforations.

Cable has never looked more handsome, he thinks, so big he blocks the doorway, image inducer off, bloody tentacle retracting back into his arm as he rushes forward to Wade's side. It's almost romantic, the look of panic on his face. He's gotta know Wade can't be killed that easily, but he still looks like the injuries matter.

The woman shoots him, screaming.

The bullets stop inches away from both of them. Wade thinks that if this were a movie, or a comic, there'd be a cool visual effect, a glowing field or something, to help readers reconcile the irrational sight of bullets just stopping. The real world should do more logical things, Wade thinks, letting Cable scoop him up.

"Wade, are you okay?" Cable's voice is a harsh electronic snarl, and Wade's never heard anything prettier. God he wants to fuck this man. Tentacles and all. Especially the tentacles. Cable huffs that dot-matrix laugh, shaking his head, looking impossibly relieved. "I'll take that as a yes."

Cable carries him all the way back downstairs. He carries him past people who are hiding and people who are dead and people who are starting to creep away now that the shooting’s stopped. In the garden center, Wade spies the last of the fucknuts, a hole punched in his forehead, too clean for a bullet. By that point, Wade could probably run on his own, but he can hear sirens in the distance and tells himself it would slow them down too much to fight this.

He lets Cable place him gently in the passenger seat and waits until they’re peeling away from the Walmart and in the opposite direction of the oncoming sirens to shoot Cable a glare.

“I told you to get the fuck out of here,” he says. “What happened to Carp?”

What he doesn’t say is, _what if you’d lost control?_ He figures by the shiver in Cable’s hands, he’s thinking that enough for both of them.

The look Cable gives him is fond and soft. “We’re a team,” he says, and Wade has to wonder if emotion plays a part in the modulation of his voice, because it’s extra static-y now. “I couldn’t just leave you there.”

Wade does not want to name the feeling that balls up in his throat at that, looks away and coughs until the sensation relaxes a bit. After a minute or two he sighs and slumps in his seat. “Well, shit,” he says. “Guess we’re drinkin’ piss anyway.”

A hand finds his, and it’s strange, how easy it is to let their fingers entangle. “We’ll figure it out,” Cable says, driving them into the desert. “Whatever we need, we’ll figure it out.”


	7. A Cup that Overflows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's the chapter you've all been waiting for. It's the reason you clicked this E-Rated, Monster-Fucker fic. Please mind the new tags before proceeding :]

They drive aimless for an hour or so, Wade doing his best to keep the conversation, such that it exists, easy. After a while, Cable's hands have gone steady on the wheel, and his expression smoothed out to it's usual level of uneasy. The panic and post-kill jitters have subsided, and there's still a mess -- Wade's absolutely disgusting, covered in his own blood and worse.

But they're both alive. If Cable keeps casually touching him, grabbing his hand for a moment or resting a big palm on Wade's knee, that's okay. Wade's always been a cuddle slut too, especially after a big job.

It's tipping into the heat of the afternoon when Wade announces that he wants a shower, grabbing his phone off the seat between them and pulling up Google. "How are we on gas?" he asks after a moment, nodding when Cable says they could use a top off, or last a few hours without. Wade taps on the 'get directions' button on his results page, and holds the phone up for Cable.

That line between those thick brows, it's gonna kill Wade. He wants to kiss it away, kiss Cable until he relaxes, until his brow creases for a totally different reason.

"It's called Love's and everything," Wade says, grinning. "I mean, we _could_ break into a motel and borrow a shower, but I think if I see a bed right now I won't get out of it until Ragnarok, so. That sounds dangerous."

Cable just gets them headed in the right direction. He's really not a chatterbox, but Wade doesn't mind. He's used to breaking his back carrying any given conversation. The curse of being incapable of shutting up.

Two hours and change later and they're pulling into a space in the back of the lot at Love's. Wade has his duffel bag laid over his chest to cover the gory hole in his shirt, though there's only so much he can do about the blood on his head and neck. When he tries to scratch it off, it just makes the skin underneath look worse.

He hands Cable a pair of fifties from his wallet. "You're going to buy a brick of soap, or a bottle of body wash, a tee-shirt, a towel if they got one, and a shower ticket. I assume your human brain in robot body can manage a list of four items. You may keep the change, so when I'm clean you can buy us dinner at the burger joint inside."

Cable's smile is thin, but it's still a smile. He looks worried, but Wade figures that's fair. He won't be the only customer in the store, and his last exposure to American shopping tradition had been spectacularly fucked up. But he takes the money, giving Wade's hand another little squeeze, before pulling away and popping open his door.

Wade thinks it's kind of sweet, the way he leaves the screwdriver in the ignition so Wade can listen to the radio while he's gone.

Humming along to a grainy version of _Party in the USA_ , Wade's watching as best he can through the windows. Cable at least is a good enough actor to move about the store confidently, grabbing what he needs. Takes his sweet time about it, too; it's a full ten minutes before Wade tracks him walking up to the attendant, nodding and chatting. Wade's fingers drumming on his thigh feel numb, and he's not... not _nervous_ , really, nerves are for people who don't have guns and swords and the ability to kick ass without worrying about dying, but...

Well, he wishes Cable would hurry it the fuck up. He's getting tired of the itchy dry blood scaled down the back of his head.

Sliding back into his seat, Cable passes the little bag over. "They had ivory soap bricks and they had sample bottles of body wash. I grabbed both. The shower is available now, and you have half an hour."

Stripping out of the new and completely useless shirt from Walmart, Wade wiggles into the (too large, but very soft) shirt Cable had grabbed him. "You gonna join me? I don't usually let guys who rescue me take advantage, but I'm willing to make an exception for you. We could test the integrity of the tile work."

There's a sort of hesitance in Cable Wade's not sure how to respond to. He's got plenty of reasons to decline, but Wade doesn't think any of the one's he's thinking about are the usual ones. It's not how disgusting Wade looks, it's not the location -- Wade doesn't know what it is. Cable frowns and looks out the window, making a thoughtful noise before shaking his head.

"No," he says, but the _way_ he says it doesn't give Wade the normal feeling of crushing disappointment. There's a certain spark to his eyes when he says, careful and halting, "But I would... appreciate it if you were... thorough."

Wade bounces his eyebrows and rushes off, surprised by the feeling of warmth settling around his chest.

Keying in the code and tossing his bag of supplies to the side, Wade first and foremost luxuriates in hot running water. He hasn't showered since the last job he took, back in Boston. There had been a dingy hotel involved, and the tiles had been coming loose, mold forming on the seam between ceiling and wall. This was nicer, which was shocking, given the reputation of truck stops.

Not a glory hole in sight.

Maybe in the restroom.

Cable hadn't skimped. There was a wash cloth and tooth care kit as well as the soaps and towel Wade had asked for. With half an hour to play with, Wade took his time soaping himself up, knowing the washcloth would be trash by the time he was done. Towel probably too, though Cable had wisely chosen a big beach towel in a dark colour, which would hide the streaks of blood that were inevitable with some of the more fragile patches of Wade's skin.

The careful way Cable had made his interest clear wasn't the sort of thing Wade usually got hot over, but he couldn't, for one reason or another, stop playing that word over in his head, the gravel-rough of that voice telling him to be 'thorough'. He wonders, running wet fingers down his front, teasing himself, if Cable would be the kind of guy who acted mad if Wade told him he jacked off in the shower already.

Would he act possessive? When he touched Wade, he was always so careful, that first meeting not withstanding. Would he be rougher when sex was on the table?

He uses the whole allotted time slot, just tugging his shirt down as the door swung shut and locked behind him, tossing the ruined washcloth and empty body wash bottle in the trash as he jogged back out to the truck.

It's hot. It's barely April but it's Nevada and it's hot, the last remaining bits of wet on Wade's skin drying up as he heads to lean on the driver's side window, grinning through it at Cable. His mouth feels minty and clean, and he wants to kiss him before they eat so Cable can taste too. It takes more self control than he’s used to displaying to keep himself from doing exactly that when the big guy opens his door and steps out to join Wade.

"I spotted some stuff we could grab for our little camping trip if you wanna get burgers and run," Wade suggests, chucking the plastic back with the damp towel and toothbrush into the car before Cable shuts the door. "Not a full like, camp set up, no tents or nothin', but I don't think rain is our biggest worry here."

"No," Cable agrees, heading toward the building. "But sunburn and exposure still are."

"I'll buy a hat," Wade says easily, skipping in step beside him. "And we can hide in the truck through the worst of the heat."

He loads them up with bottles of water and Gatorade, some nonperishable foodstuffs, a few more shirts (he finds one, exactly _one_ , large enough to stretch over Cable's considerable bulk), as well as some general supplies for fire-starting. He eyes a soft-looking throw blanket and ends up leaving it where it lies, because it's a particularly hideous shade of baby-shit green and he fears that, soft or no, a blanket that colour would spoil his chances of getting laid.

They check out and then duck into the adjoined burger place, grabbing a couple burgers a piece, and Wade grins in delight when Cable presses a hand into his lower back as they leave. Those casual touches, it was unreasonable how well they lit him up.

As they drive, Wade directing Cable onto more and more remote paths, until what they're driving on is clearly no road at all but rather some kind of service trail, they eat. It feels... good. Good to be clean and out on their own with no real concrete plan, the implication of sex later heavy on Wade's mind but not crushing. When they finally find a place to stop, Wade puts his old survival training to good use, managing to build a low, but satisfactory fire. They'd need more and better supplies eventually, probably sooner than Wade would like, but this would do for a few days. Just them, the truck, and burnable brush in the middle of nowhere.

When Cable sits a little ways from the fire, there’s an invitation in the way he looks at Wade, and not one Wade thinks he could ever say no to. He settles without a word on Cable’s lap, and just like that in image inducer flicks off. There they are, an ugly man in the arms of a gorgeous monster, still for just a moment. When Cable kisses him, it’s easy and warm.

Cable has a way of kissing that leaves Wade incapable of focusing on much else. That says a lot, given that Wade’s brain was usually running a mile a minute on three or four tracks at once.

Both other times they’d stopped on their little roadtrip across America, climbing into the back of the pickup to neck for a bit in places so remote it was unlikely anyone would catch them, Cable had always let Wade set the pace. He was gentle and careful in the way he returned his touches, but Wade was free to be as handsy and as bold as he wanted to be.

This time when Wade cuts his lip on those teeth, Cable pulls away a little. “Careful,” he mutters, resting a hand on Wade’s cheek and holding him still. “I want to take my time with you.”

Possibly the sexiest words Wade has ever heard. He loops his arms around Cable’s shoulders, gripping the back of his neck as he’s drawn back in to that open, careful kissing. “You can take _all_ the time you want,” he says, tipping his head helpfully to the side when Cable starts kissing along his jaw, “but the longer you take, the more thoroughly I expect you to rearrange my guts.”

There’s something beautiful about that laugh, maybe the way it always comes as a surprise, seemingly to both of them. “You need to learn patience,” Cable says, speaking against his throat.

“ _You_ need to learn, uh,” Wade tries, a little distracted by the hands on him, one spread over his back and one gripping his ass, distracted too by the teeth working carefully at the side of his neck. “Uh, you need to learn… not to be a fucking tease, is what you need to learn, Jesus.”

“Oh, is that what I’m being,” Cable asks dryly, like he doesn’t fucking know. Like he’s not perfectly fucking aware of what he’s doing to Wade. Wade wants to snap and snarl and goad him, he wants to not be the only one going out of his fucking mind here, but then Cable is helping pull of his shirt, laying him back gently against the rocky, warm dirt. “You know I hate to see you suffer.”

In the gathering dark, Wade loses track of time. It’s not hard to do, with the way Cable keeps distracting him with kisses and touches, with a hand slipped into his shorts, groping his ass, groping his junk, never quite enough to get off on, just enough that Wade can’t stop wanting just a little more. As it gets darker, Cable gets bolder, shucking his own shirt, opening the fly of Wade’s pants, slow and not exactly steady, building his own rhythm as he worries those teeth into Wade’s neck, his shoulder, his lips.

“Okay so sharesies,” Wade says suddenly, leaning back into dirt. “Why _are_ your teeth so sharp? Like, if you were a normal lookin’ dude before, what’s the point?”

"I really don't want to talk about it right now," Cable says, shifting his hips up in a rough grind against Wade's, like Wade's too fucking stupid to figure out what he means. Wade considers being a brat, keeping up the act that he’s not so ready for this he feels like screaming, but then Cable purrs this low sound, rocking their hips together again, rubbing something hard and eager against him.

So Wade files the questions -- so, so many questions -- away for later, and hooks his hands back around those broad, firm shoulders, dragging the immovable down to him to kiss again.

This time, Cable doesn't hesitate. They take it slower, not as desperate as the first few, and Wade finds an angle that lets him slip his tongue past those razor teeth without cutting himself quite so badly. The slide of his tongue against Cable's is odd; whatever the TO secretes in lieu of saliva is thick and a little slick, bitter tasting but not bad. Cable rumbles a little noise when Wade pulls back to pant a little, shifts to nuzzle against the warmth of him.

Wade wonders if he's cold. He feels cool against Wade, not dead but just... cool. Parts of him are warmer than others, all the parts that move more, but his chest, his hips, his belly; they're actually cool to the touch, and not just because Wade always runs so hot. Usually he'd have jokes to make, cold toes in bed, tell him someplace crude to warm his fingers, but there's something about having all that weight and intention curled over him, thick tentacles starting to unravel from his bulky arms to wrap around Wade's wrists and up to his elbows. Pinning him. Holding him down while Cable nuzzles meaningfully at his throat, his clavicle, down and down.

It should be horrifying, in the dark, out in the middle of the desert where no one will ever find him. He feels cool metal brush against his face, caressing along his jaw, up his cheek, fond and sweet, but he knows how easily that gentle touch could turn to agony, how quickly and neatly Cable could have him full of new holes, nailed to the rocky ground and feeling out his internals while the virus fights with the healing factor.

He knows, even as the cords and tendrils and tentacles are feeling out the edges of his waistband, even as he's pinned and spread and moved just how Cable wants him, that Cable doesn't want to hurt him. That's the thrill -- more than maybe anyone else in the world, Cable could hurt him, really, truly hurt him... and he won't. He doesn't want to, so he won't.

Metal lips, still warm from kissing, warm from Wade, trail over the swell of a pectoral, tongue feeling out the ridges of tumor and lesion and scar while thick fingers -- too many, too spread out, so more tentacles probably -- begin tugging Wade's shorts off. Wade's breath catches, gasping, at the sensation of something cool and flexible brushing down along the seam of thigh and groin, seeking heat, too eager to wait for the pants to be fully off. It's long and rapidly warming, no thicker than a finger, and it wraps itself eagerly around Wade's dick and balls, scooping all of him up and coiling, undulating in the weirdest full-package massage Wade's ever been treated to.

Shorts come off. Good riddance, they were uncomfortable anyway, and really, definitely, not built for two. Two thicker cords take hold of his thighs, and Wade has just enough presence of mind to wonder, as his knees are guided toward his chest, just what happened to those big hands.

"I can't... do everything I'd like," Cable says, and it's interesting, how his voice modulates so much emotion out of his tone, but he can still sound both hungry and remorseful. "It's a shame because your cock looks so good."

"Ha, funny, I love jokes," Wade says, because it's easier to decide that was supposed to be mockery than try to cobble together any measure of logic by which any part of him looks good.

Evidently a mistake, because suddenly the grip on his dick is gone leaving him held down and wanting. "Look at me," Cable says, and Wade doesn't really have a choice. He opens his eyes and in the sulky light of their low fire, Cable is quite literally all he can see. It feels like Cable's everywhere because he is. The framework of a human body is still there somewhere in the form hunched over him, but there are wires and cords and tentacles of thick, not-quite-cold metal everywhere. Holding Wade, spread along the ground beside him, touching just to touch, waving in the air. Cable is almost shapeless in the dark, and in a very real way, he's something terrifying to look at, the incomprehensible melting into something too painfully human to ignore.

Wade's so hard it hurts, and Cable refuses to move, waiting until Wade flops back into the dirt.

"This is the most human part of me now," Cable says, running a flesh-and-bone hand that's attached to his torso by a mess of metal cables no longer trying to look like an arm up Wade's thigh, running fingers over his abs. "This and my brain. Do you think I'm lying when I say you look good?"

"I think the ruler you're usin' to measure with is broke," Wade grumbles, rolling his eyes  at the night sky. "I also think I'm gonna go soft if you start trying to talk about feelings and hearts and beauty in the eye of the beholder or whatever. Sweet talk me later, wreck my ass now."

Cable’s laughter still sounds like a lagging router, and Wade’s a little alarmed again by how much he’s come to love that.

And while the surface of Cable's metal flesh might be cool to the touch, it turns out his tongue and his mouth are blood hot and that slick pseudo-saliva is thick and wet. Wade gasps and arches, digging his shoulders in the rocky ground as he tries hard not to buck upward into that maw. He almost wants to just give up and do it at the second pass of that slick, too-solid-to-be-human tongue over his balls, because as much as he treasures his bits staying intact, he really does want more, he wants to feel that care and restrain crack.

Those teeth are a threat, they're a danger, but are they really any more a danger than the tentacles holding him down, the tender brush of metal over the curve of Wade's cheek?

A mess of thinner, tangled tendrils presses against Wade's lower stomach and it takes him a second to realize that what he's feeling is the press of what's left of Nate's metal hand, and for some goddamn reason that gets him so close he has to bite his own lip bloody to keep himself from busting two seconds in like some untried teen getting his first handjob.

"I don't think I've ever heard you be so quiet for so long," Cable says, and Wade really doesn't understand how a voice that sounds like it would be at home coming out of a fucking GPS can be both snide and sexy, but he manages. "Here I expected you to be babbling all your usual bullshit, but no, you can't seem to find a damn thing to say."

Wade opens his mouth to say something, anything, even if it's just a string of cussing to prove the big metal bastard wrong. He's never needed a functioning brain to run his mouth, he'd managed to get a few zingers in even with Cable's tentacle punching a hole into his brain-case.

"It's flattering," Cable says with another grinding chuckle, and the tentacle curling over his cheek is suddenly pressing into his mouth, and Wade can't help closing his lips around it, pleased when Cable makes this odd warbling sound, the kind of glitchy grind that should set his teeth on edge but instead just makes him smug.

It seems to distract Cable and Wade wants to spur him -- he said to wreck his ass, not starfish the second Wade gets his mouth on him -- but he's still held down, and part of him really likes the idea that he can set Cable off that quick. He doesn't fight it when the tentacle in his mouth goes straight for his throat; he leans into it, gagging eagerly around the twitching length of metal.

There's a sharp feeling of pain as the tendrils holding him down tighten, the sound of soil and rock shifting as the metal burrows and coils back around, effectively rooting him. He can feel Cable panting against his thigh and can't help wondering what it would be like to get his mouth on whatever Cable's packing for a dick. Or maybe this _is_ what Cable's packing, just another long, infinitely flexible tentacle ready to dive in and explore Wade's insides.

That should probably be the opposite of a turn on, Wade thinks, feeling his own dick twitch at the thought. He can't help remembering the first time Cable had touched him, the tentacles grabbing on, yanking him down, binding him, one wavering in front of his face before punching into his skull, messy and painful and digging around in the Quaker Oats mess of his brain. It's not sexy, not the way Cable lapping at his balls was sexy, but there was something about the way he'd been trapped and the way he'd been stuck in that him-but-not-him place, too aware of everything in the world for a man who should have been dying or dead.

He's so hard he could scream and every time he swallows around the thick, hot metal plugging his throat this awful, wet popping sound escapes, and then Cable finally, finally moves again, nosing under his balls and licking hotly at his hole. Wade keens around his throat-full of metal, the noise wet and desperate as more thin cords and cables slide over the curve of his ass, holding him open, lifting him, moving him, shoving his knees down into his chest.

He can't help it; he cums, cock pulsing in the loose metal grip still coiled around him, spunk splattering onto his chest and chin. He cums hard and messy and the tentacle in his mouth pulls out, trailing spit and giving him room to breathe so it can rub through the mess he's made all over himself.

"Are you done?" Cable asks, pulling away after one more wet pass of his tongue, not sounding disappointed, exactly. "Should I stop?"

"Kill you, I'll kill you in your goddamn sleep if you stop, I said wreck me you goddamn sonofabitch, if your cock isn't in my ass sometime tonight I want a goddamn refund," Wade manages, wheezing and gulping for air, before that tentacle is back at his lips, slick now with his own cum and smearing it hotly over his tongue. "Nasty," he breathes, and sucks it back into his mouth.

Cable makes a sound like he’s reading a keysmash out loud through an industrial fan. Too many consonants and a lot of static. Wade's not entirely sure why that sound is such a sexy thing, but it really is; Wade's cock is too sensitive to really enjoy the slither and clench of the slender tentacle still coiled around him, but the slick, hot pass of tongue over his hole makes him dizzy with how good it feels.

This time the tentacle feeling out his mouth is less aggressive. It tastes like metal and salt, the slick of his own cum cutting the bitter taste that seems to be the default of the TO mesh. Wade hooks his tongue around the underside and leans up, swallowing it down.

Fingers, real, human fingers, ghost down the back of his knee, over the swell of his thigh, and Wade tries to follow the movement, unable to figure out what kind of angle Cable's arm is bent at before realizing it's probably not an arm at all anymore. All he can hear is the wet sound of his throat and mouth working the tentacle in his mouth and the dry shifting of the metal skating across the ground and itself. He's slick with sweat, the night dry and warm, and the grip on him seems to tighten and relax with each bob of his head.

He's not the only one who's ridiculously into this, and the fact makes him feel a little smug. Cable has to spend all his time in some major self-control, all his urges and wants on a tight lock-down. Alone with Wade, he can relax, and that's... important. It's good, good that Cable knows it's safe to relax a little around him, that he wants this enough to allow it, and yet still, _still_ has done nothing to hurt him.

Everything whites out of his mind at the blunt press of a finger against his ass. He gasps around the tentacle in his mouth, chokes as it disengages suddenly. As the tentacle pulls out, the finger presses in, slick with what can only be that viscous pseudo-saliva. There's an odd, lilting moan that it takes Wade a second to realize is coming from his own empty, sore throat. His cock is swelling again, and once more he's very aware of Cable's breath panting against the back of one thigh.

A second finger presses in and he groans, almost sobbing, and Cable kisses at the skin of his thigh, calming. Like he thinks Wade is overwhelmed, like he needs to soothed, like he can't tell that Wade's absolutely into this. He tries to grind back into the touch, feeling those long, thick fingers twisting and circling each other tightly inside him. Maybe Cable thinks he's struggling, or maybe he really is  just a tease, but he goes completely still when Wade twitches against him.

"More, you can't, you... more, c'mon," he manages, and it would be more embarrassing, how whiny he sounds, if Cable were any less good at this, if Wade hadn't been desperate for it forever ago. "Get your dick out, I'm good, I'm ready, you know you can't hurt me, please just --"

Wade's voice dissolves into a choking ramble of gibberish as another finger pushes into him, stretching him wide.

"Someone's bragging," he manages, and then gasps again as that tongue laps at his taint, nose nudging the underside of his balls. The tentacle around his dick constricts again. It hurts just right, a sweet tangle of pain and pleasure shooting into the core of him.

And it's filthy, it's all absolutely nasty, the best kind of sex always is, but it's also perfect, like Cable knows him already well enough to unravel him, turn him into a messy puddle pinned to the ground. The desert night sounds are much softer than the kind of noise Wade is used to hearing. There are no bed springs to make creak, no drywall to smash with the headboard, no neighbours to file a complaint come morning.  

It's just them, just the two of them under the stars, fucking in the scree far outside of what passes for a city in Nowhere, Nevada. Wade wants to get his hands on Cable, wants to feel the strangeness of him; he wants to fuck in a hotel room or at least in the sunshine, so he can see Cable as more than a dark mass in and around him. As it is, the sun is gone and the stars are bright -- so many, so goddamn many, and how is that so pretty when he's seen it about ten thousand times by this point? -- but they're in the dark. There’s not much left to their campfire now, just glowing coals that do little more than make the dark seem darker.

Even if it means Cable seeing him, he wants to see Cable. It's the kind of romantic bullshit he only ever thinks of when getting his brain fucked out, when he's so brain dead he can't make himself turn it into a joke. He wants to see Cable because all this that Cable's trying to hide, doing this in the dark and keeping Wade pinned so he can't touch, all of it, all of him, is amazing. It's sexy. He thinks he's a monster because he looks fucked up and he's killed a few people, but he's gorgeous.

"Next time we're doing this at noon," he pants, watching Cable move between his legs, feeling those fingers finally pull out. Cable is massive, he's everywhere, blocking out a good portion of the sky and looming, and Wade feels a thrill as that huge silhouette leans in close, down out of the shadow and into the thin light coming off the fire. Cable's face is smeared with wet, his own drool, lips parted so he can pant.

"Cute you think there's gonna be a next time," he growls, and Wade rocks his head back and laughs, breathless and delighted as Cable starts pressing something thick and hard and definitely not flesh into him. When he kisses Wade's throat, Wade really wishes he could get his hands up and around those shoulders, wishes he could cling to something other than the gravelly dirt under his palms.

"There's gonna... gonna be _so many_ next times," he pants out, angling his head down and catching a kiss while he can. He doesn't care if that mouth was just on his ass, he's had worse in there and really, the least you can do when a man eats you raw is kiss him when you get the opportunity. "Noon, and I'm gonna ride you."

Cable whines, he actually _whines_ , and his cock (or the tentacle he's using as a cock, and honestly Wade can't bring himself to care if there's a difference at this point) is huge and hard, really testing that 'rearrange my guts' suggestion Wade had made. Wade can't hook his heels around Cable's sides like this, can't kick him into gear, so he's stuck gasping, laid out like a bug on a board, full of dick all the way to his throat it seems, letting Cable just sort of shiver and grind against him. His hips are sharp, the ridge of pelvic bone really digging in, and Wade can't complain even if he wants so, so much more.

"You ready?" Cable asks, and Wade's not sure he's ever heard a sexier question, until he nods and Cable growls, "You want me to fill you up?"

"God, yeah," Wade breathes back, and then moans loudly at the drag of Cable pulling back. His hole feels stretched and sloppy already, and still stretched so tight when Cable drives back into him. The grip massaging around his own leaking cock is moving again, undulating as the tip of the tentacle traces the edge of his foreskin and then teases the head, pressing at his urethra. Someone's babbling curses, hoarse and steady, and he's pretty sure that's gotta be him. He isn't sure, suddenly, what Cable meant with that second question, but he's eager to find out. "Fill me up, gimme."

It's so much, it's absolutely everything Wade could have dreamed of and more. Cable starts out with slow, steady thrusts, the kind that force Wade to feel every centimeter he's got, but as several thinner tendrils start fighting to push against the head of Wade's dick, teasing into the slit but not plunging in yet, the pace is picked up. He's getting everything he could ask for and all it's doing is giving him ideas for more. Next time, next time, if the first time doesn't kill him, because it might.

You can die from feeling too good, right? Because if you can, this is the kind of fucking that murders people.

The press of the tendril into his cock burns; it’s like fire shooting down his dick and that should be miserable but it rockets through him like pleasure, pressing in and and until it feels like something is spearing into the pleasure center of Wade’s system, which he’d have thought would be in his brain or maybe his prostate but evidently is found somewhere in his dick. His scream is muffled by the thicker tentacle in his mouth, and he can’t -- he can’t thrust into the tangle of tentacles teasing his dick, he can’t rock up into the pounding in his ass, he can’t _move_ , but that’s somehow just part of the good.

He’s trapped, swallowed up in Cable, the focus of every bit of his attention it seems, taken in every way he could be. His heart is slamming around his chest, his brain is howling noise, and when the tendril inside his dick slides back, Wade cums like a shot, feeling it burning through him, torn out of him. He’s not sure if he’s crying or not but it would be appropriate, Cable continuing to thrust hard and heavy into him.

Whatever Cable’s got inside him still, Wade can feel it flex and shift, not just thrusting but writhing inside him, not going still until all of Cable suddenly seizes, stock-still and stiff as he grinds out this inhuman sound of obvious pleasure.

There is no sensation to accompany whatever Cable experiences in orgasm. No cum, no secretion or ejaculate of any kind.

Slowly, twitching like he’s so over-sensitive he can barely function, Cable gathers himself. There’s a sound like knives drawn over one another, metal over metal, things clicking softly into place as Wade is slowly, reverently laid back flat and Cable regains a sense of human shape, a man again.

Wade lets himself take his time catching his breath, shivering as he realizes that it might have been going on 80° when the sun was up, but in the dark it’s considerably colder. He thinks he shoulder clean up. He thinks he should move.

Cable lays carefully beside him and, without a word, draws him in close, cradling him against his chest, pressing warm metal lips to his brow. Wade can feel a dozen different bruises busily healing, his whole body working to undo any damage that might have caused him. He wonders, idly, if anyone else could do that to him. If anyone could do for Cable what he’d just done.

“Are you okay,” Cable asks, soft and tired. “Was that alright?”

It almost makes him laugh. He nuzzles against Cable’s chest, where the metal is still inhumanly cool, lets his sweat and the cum smeared on his chest and chin trade off onto Cable. Sharing is caring, after all. “I’m good,” he says, exhaustion edging in. “I’m really fuckin’ good.”


End file.
